[SOLVED] printf not working in scripts called from cron

[pindakoe]

I have a script that prints a list of numbers which sometimes go up to a few Gb. For clarity I use printf %'15d as format (thouand separators). When calling this script from command-line it works as advertised:

/home/*/.cache/sessions                        9,616 
/home/*/.cache                               464,526 
/home/*/.local/share/Trash                57,425,266

However when (ana)cron starts it (as root) I do not get thousand separators.

I have been thinking this has to do with the shell under which this runs (printf being a built-in in bash), but (1) the script starts with #!/bin/bash, (2) /bin/sh is anyway a symlink to /bin/bash, (3) no change when I manually set shell=/bin/bash in /etc/anacrontab or /etc/crontab and (4) a printenv in the script confirms it to have bash as shell. Any clues?

[mtk]

the '%' character is special in crontabs. it is converted to a newline. it has to be quoted with '\' to remain a real '%'.
i.e. printf \%'15d'.

/mark

[cazo]

I believe it has something to do with 'locale' (but don't ask me to explain it).

Try adding

LC_NUMERIC=en_US.utf8

(or whatever your locale is set to) to the cron script.

I tried a simple batch file (run from cron) and got commas with that setting. Putting a locale command at the top showed that the script has LC_ set as POSIX. This would be the equivalent of

LC_NUMERIC=POSIX printf "%'15d\n" 57425266

(which doesn't show thousands separators).

[pindakoe]

Done some testing. Thanks cazo -- changing the locale (or at least the numeric formatting) works. Obvious once you think about it. @mtk -- quoting the % with a backslash did not make any difference, but possibly because the formatting string was already between double quotes:

printf "%'d\n" 1245 produces 1'245
printf "\%'d\n" 1234 produces \1'245

Both assume that LC_NUMERIC has been set to en_US.utf8