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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
From: Bill Fenner <fenner@parc.xerox.com>
To: bugs@freebsd.org
To: marcus@ccelab.iastate.edu
Subject: Re: Crontab and the % character
References: <marcus.225.0201FF80@ccelab.iastate.edu>
Organization: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Message-Id: <95Sep8.154737pdt.177475@crevenia.parc.xerox.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 1995 15:47:34 PDT
Sender: bugs-owner@freebsd.org
Precedence: bulk

In article <marcus.225.0201FF80@ccelab.iastate.edu>,
Marcus I. Ryan <marcus@ccelab.iastate.edu> wrote:
>I issue the command - stathtml `date +"%B %b"`
>If I use the %'s by themselves then it interprets them as special control 
>characters, but if I put a \ in front of each, the command is interpreted 
>literally (i.e. "\%B \%b").

This is a bug.  Try this patch.  It turns "\%" into "%", "\\" into "\",
and leaves "\*" (where * is any character other than % or \) alone.

  Bill

--- usr.sbin/cron/cron/do_command.c.orig	Fri Sep  8 15:23:27 1995
+++ usr.sbin/cron/cron/do_command.c	Fri Sep  8 15:40:49 1995
@@ -122,13 +122,21 @@
 	 * command, and subsequent characters are the additional input to
 	 * the command.  Subsequent %'s will be transformed into newlines,
 	 * but that happens later.
+	 *
+	 * If there are escaped %'s, remove the escape character.
 	 */
 	/*local*/{
 		register int escaped = FALSE;
 		register int ch;
+		register char *p;
 
-		for (input_data = e->cmd;  ch = *input_data;  input_data++) {
+		for (input_data = p = e->cmd; ch = *input_data;
+		     input_data++, p++) {
+			if (p != input_data)
+			    *p = ch;
 			if (escaped) {
+				if (ch == '%' || ch == '\\')
+					*--p = ch;
 				escaped = FALSE;
 				continue;
 			}
@@ -141,6 +149,7 @@
 				break;
 			}
 		}
+		*p = '\0';
 	}
 
 	/* fork again, this time so we can exec the user's command.