Cant exec multiple lines in Terminal or Crontab.

Question

I want a crontab of this (or even a script)
15 16 * * 5 mkdir /Users/Jeff/Desktop/Student\ Logins/; mkdir /Users/Jeff/Desktop/Student\ Logins/`date '+%m-%d-%y'`-`hostname`/; mkdir /Users/Jeff/Desktop/Student\ Logins/`date '+%m-%d-%y'`-`hostname`/iSight/; cp -v /var/log/isight /Users/Jeff/Desktop/Student\ Logins/`date '+%m-%d-%y'`-`hostname`/iSight/; cp -v /var/log/usertracking.log /Users/Jeff/Desktop/Student\ Logins/`date '+%m-%d-%y'`-`hostname`/ > /Users/Jeff/Desktop/lastrun.txt
I can exec every line individually, but thats it, only one line at a time.
Am i doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Two things come to mind.
First, you can collapse all the mkdir statements into one using the -p switch:
<pre class=command>mkdir -p /Users/Jeff/Desktop/Student\ Logins/`date '+%m-%d-%y'`-`hostname`/iSight/</pre>
The -p flag creates all the intermediate directories if they don't already exist.
Secondly, what's the nature of your home directory? Is it local, or network-based? If it's network based I could see there might be a problem trying to run the command if the directory isn't mounted (e.g. you're logged out), but that's all I can think of off-hand.