Using curl with filename containing a dynamic date

Question

I'm trying to upload dynamically created log file from my local box to my FTP server. This all happens in a cron job (crontab) I run every night. It creates the file using:

30 00 * * * touch ~/Desktop/logs/"log$(date +'\%m\%d\%y')"

Which works just fine. However, when I try to upload the file using the same syntax:

50 00 * * * curl -T ~/Desktop/logs/"log$(date +'\%m\%d\&y')" -u user:pass ftp://example.com/logs/

It gives me the following error:

date: extra Operand

I also tried it without escaping the the %:

curl -T ~/Desktop/logs/"log$(date +'%m%d%y')" -u user:pass ftp://example.com/logs/

Which works in the normal command line, but when executed via the crontab, gives the following error:

/bin/sh: Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string

Any ideas how to successfully upload the daily log to my server?

Answer 1

The way I would normally specify the date in a cron job is not to have quotes around the whole name and to use backticks around the date command, so:

50 00 * * * curl -T ~/Desktop/logs/log`date +'\%m\%d\%y'` -u user:pass ftp://example.com/logs/

Although I would expect the $(date ...) syntax to work aswell.

(Oh and I'm assuming the ampersand before the y in the second cron job is a typo in the question - but if it's also in your cron job that will be a problem.)