Why is my crontab giving me a bad username error?
I’m trying to zip a directory and copy it over as a backup. I’m new to Linux to so I followed guides as best as I could, but when trying
systemctl status cron
I get the following error:
Apr 27 13:34:01 mc-server cron[950]: Error: bad username; while reading /etc/crontab
Running the command standalone works as expected (the 3 minute timer was only for testing purposes).
This is the full crontab:
# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
# Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab'
# command to install the new version when you edit this file
# and files in /etc/cron.d. These files also have username fields,
# that none of the other crontabs do.
SHELL=/bin/sh
# You can also override PATH, but by default, newer versions inherit it from the environment
#PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
# Example of job definition:
# .---------------- minute (0 - 59)
# | .------------- hour (0 - 23)
# | | .---------- day of month (1 - 31)
# | | | .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
# | | | | .---- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
# | | | | |
# * * * * * user-name command to be executed
17 * * * * root cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6 * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )
47 6 * * 7 root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly )
52 6 1 * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly )
*/3 * * * * root zip -r -q /mnt/truenas/Ozone/Backup_$(TZ="Europe/Berlin" date "+%A_%d.%m.%y_%H;%M").zip /home/rexor/mcserver
#
From man 5 crontab:
The “sixth” field (the rest of the line) specifies the command to be run. The entire command portion of the line, up to a newline or % character, will be executed by /bin/sh or by the shell specified in the SHELL variable of the crontab file. Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless escaped with backslash (), will
be changed into newline characters, and all data after the first % will be sent to the command as standard input. There is no way to split a single command line
onto multiple lines, like the shell’s trailing "".
I’m not sure why this causes the mentioned error, but try escaping the ‘%’ in your commands and see if it helps:
*/3 * * * * root zip -r -q /mnt/truenas/Ozone/Backup_$(TZ="Europe/Berlin" date "+%A_%d.%m.%y_%H;%M").zip /home/rexor/mcserver