Hi There,

Sorry for a basic question but I can't get this to work.

I'm adding a line to my cronjobs to automate a mysqldump and this works:

mysqldump -u root -pxxxx --opt rainweb > /usr/local/apache/htdocs/rweb2/bups/backup2.sql

But, when I add in the date function I get "Illegal variable name":

mysqldump -u root -pxxxx --opt rainweb > /usr/local/apache/htdocs/rweb2/bups/backup-$(date +%m%d%Y).sql

I got this code from:
http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article.php?article_id=123

I haven't tried this from CRON, just at the command line. I can't see what's wrong with my syntax - probably my head cold!

Thanks and Merry Christmas.
JW

I think you need to put the command that you run "within" in back quotes and not using the $(....) notation.

Example:

mysqldump -u root -pxxxx --opt rainweb > /usr/local/apache/htdocs/rweb2/bups/backup-`date +%m%d%Y`.sql

That worked fine from the command line but CRON doesn't like it and returns "Syntax error: EOF in backquote substitution".

I put it into an executable script, called that from CRON and that works fine.

Thanks Graham

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