Constraints for getting commands executed by cron

Question

Why does my crontab work fine when I run it manually, but not when cron runs it. The following is what my crontab looks like:

0 0 * * * pg_dump DB_NAME > /path/to/dumps/`date +%Y%m%d`.dmp

After going through all logs, here's what I found: 

Dec 12 00:00:01 localhost crond[17638]: (postgres) CMD (pg_dump DB_NAME > /path/to/dumps/`date +)

As far as I can understand, it seems as though there is a problem involving some percent signs. However, I don't really have a single percentage character all throughout my man page. Could anyone tell me what's actually wrong or what's going on in here?

Answer 1

I think the problem could be those percent signs in your crontab that you did not escape using a backslash, which you should do. So, change it into something like this(check man page also):

0 0 * * * pg_dump DB_NAME > /path/to/dumps/`date +\%Y\%m\%d`.dmp

Check this out;

From man 5 crontab:
The ‘‘sixth’’ field (the rest of the line) specifies the command to be run. The entire command portion of the line, up to a newline or % character, will be executed by /bin/sh or by the shell specified in the SHELL variable of the crontab file. Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless escaped with backslash (\), will be changed into newline characters, and all data after the first % will be sent to the command as standard input. There is no way to split a single command line onto multiple lines, like the shell’s trailing "\".