WP Toolkit cron job error notification

Symptoms

After a recent cPanel update, E-Mails sent from the server contained an error that a cron job failed due to a bad syntax related to the WP Toolkit extension.

Description

The subject of the E-Mail being sent from the affected server is:

Cron <root@servername> sleep $((1 + RANDOM

The error in the E-Mail is:

/bin/sh: -c: line 0: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `)'
/bin/sh: -c: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of file

The affected cron is /etc/cron.d/wp-toolkit-update and cron job command:

{{0 1 * * * root sleep $((1 + RANDOM % 5))h $((1 + RANDOM % 60))m; /usr/bin/yum -y update wp-toolkit-c

The WP Toolkit team has fixed the issue in WP Toolkit 5.1.0+. 

Workaround

The "%" should be replaced with "\%" in /etc/cron.d/wp-toolkit-update. You can run this command to fix the file.

sed -i 's/\%/\\%/g' /etc/cron.d/wp-toolkit-update