crontab mysqldump syntax

I am trying to make a simple cron script to backup my db using mysqldump. I am entering the script via crontab in plesk.

here is the script:

mysqldump -ufred -p***** email_list2 > /home/httpd/vhosts/mySite.com/httpdocs/dump_`date +%d%m%Y_%H%M`.txt

It works great when i run it at the command line.

But, when run via cron i get this error:
/bin/sh: -c: line 1: unexpected EOF while looking for matching ``'
/bin/sh: -c: line 2: syntax error: unexpected end of file

Also, if I remove the `date +%d%m%Y%H%M` it works too.

Have read many threads, and it seems that this is the syntax people are using.

Any thoughts?
thanks.

Just out of curiousity, what shell are you using to run it when you run it manually?

Maybe that shell handles the ' ` characters differently than /bin/sh (which is what it looks like cron is using). I don't know for sure, I'm mostly guessing based on the context of the error. Try switching to /bin/sh yourself and run the line manually and see if it still works.

Check cron environment variables of SHELL, HOME etc there. Try to export other variables on cron script itself.

Try as,

FILE="/home/httpd/vhosts/mySite.com/httpdocs/dump_$(date +%d%m%Y_%H%M).txt"

mysqldump -ufred -p***** email_list2 > $FILE

Try this out. And tell.

HTH.

Typically the path in cron is /usr/bin and /usr/sbin so it can't find the date function. Use /bin/date instead and you should be OK.

If you run that exact command from cron it will not work as cron does not know how to cope with things like `date ...`. You would need to put the actual command within a wrapper script.

In fact you can use any command as you would from the command-line. You have to be careful with escapes and quotes but it all works. Here is a working example of what I use to automate a myldump with cron:
58 13 * * 2,5 mysqldump --user=user --password=pass --host=127.0.0.1 mydb > /var/backups/mydb-`/bin/date +\%Y\%m\%d`

For example, yesterday (Tuesday) at 1:58 PM, it dumped the sql to /var/backups/mydb-20080506