Can cron do this?

There seem to be two issues: first everything after a per cent sign is getting truncated. You would think that I would have encountered a cron command before that used a %, but I guess that this must be my first. Also the backtick expressions are not being evaluated.

The syntax that works for me is:

          • eval [ `date +\%e` -gt 8 -a `date +\%` -lt 11] && <command>

This is ugly enough that some cool script is needed. I'll write one this weekend.