Percent sign % doesn't work in crontab

Question

I'm having a cron problem with curl:

curl -w "%{time_total}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://myurl.com >> ~/log< ;/pre>

 Works great and adds a line with total_time in the log file. 

But the same line as cron does nothing. 

This is not a path issue, since curl http://myurl.com >> ~/log works. 

Answer 1

% is a special character for crontab. From man 5 crontab:

So you need to escape the % characters:

curl -w "%{time_total}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://myurl.com >> ~/log

to

curl -w "\%{time_total}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://myurl.com >> ~/log
         ^