cron attempts to run the output of rsync?

Question

Given a line in my crontab -e:

02  12 * * *   * rsync -r -t -v /Users/pnathan/ /Volumes/archive_hdd/

I get an email from cron which looks like this:

/bin/sh: #.emacs#: command not found

#.emacs# is the first file in the rsync listing when I run the command from the command line.

When I grep ps -Af for rsync, it turns out not to have spawned. I'm gathering that somehow, bash is trying to exec the output, but doesn't make sense, at least not from my reading of the man pages.

Answer 1

You've got one too many time spec fields. It should be:

02 12 * * * rsync -r -t -v /Users/pnathan/ /Volumes/archive_hdd/