# Curator: how to escape characters of "--timestring" in systemd?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/curator-how-to-escape-characters-of-timestring-in-systemd/25222>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [July 9, 2015, 9:57am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/curator-how-to-escape-characters-of-timestring-in-systemd/25222 "2015-07-09T09:57:55Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

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**Author:** ![MichaelRuhwedel](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/michaelruhwedel/32/11452_2.png) [@MichaelRuhwedel](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/MichaelRuhwedel)\
**Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 1:17pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/curator-how-to-escape-characters-of-timestring-in-systemd/25222/2 "2015-07-13T13:17:03Z")

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I stumbled over the same issue today on CoreOs.  
I found that a single percent is escaped as '%%'.  
Things will work if you write:

--timestring '%%Y.%%m.%%d'

(from [http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.unit.html](http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.unit.html))

Cheers,  
Michael

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