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| Chapter 40 Delayed Execution |

## 40.14 Including Standard Input Within a cron Entry

Since crontab entries must be a single line long, it's hard to include any standard input with them. Sure, you can use commands like:

>     0 22 * * * echo "It's 10PM; do you know where your children are?" | wall

but you can't use "here documents" and other methods of generating multiline input; they intrinsically take several lines.

To solve this problem, cron allows you to include standard input directly on the command line. If the command contains a percent sign (`%`), cron uses any text following the sign as standard input for cmd. Additional percent signs can be used to subdivide this text into lines. For example, the following crontab entry:

>     30 11 31 12 * /etc/wall%Happy New Year!%Let's make next year great!

runs the wall command at 11:30 a.m. on December 31st, using the text:

>     Happy New Year!
>     Let's make next year great!

as standard input. [If you need a literal percent sign in your entry, for a command like `date +%a`, escape the percent sign with a backslash: `\%`. -JP ]

- AF from O'Reilly & Associates' Essential System Administration

40.13 Adding crontab Entries |  | 40.15 crontab Script Makes crontab Editing Easier/Safer