Issue in Elasticsearch Curator cron job

I learned a lesson that cron treats '%' character as  a special character.

I have written "elasticsearch-curator" cronjob for closing the elasticsearch indexes older than 2 days and the elasticsearch index was not getting closed for some reason. However, I was able to execute the same command in bash shell without any issues.

0 8 * * * /usr/bin/curator --host 10.1.0.46 close indices --time-unit days --timestring "%Y.%m.%d" --older-than 2 > /dev/null 2>&1

The google search pointed me to the link:
http://www.ducea.com/2008/11/12/using-the-character-in-crontab-entries/

and then, I realized that I have to escape % character in my cron job!!

0 8 * * * /usr/bin/curator --host 10.1.0.46 close indices --time-unit days --timestring "\%Y.\%m.\%d" --older-than 2 > /dev/null 2>&1

Similarly, if you wish to delete older indices, you can use:

$ /usr/bin/curator --host 10.44.0.46 delete indices --older-than 10 --time-unit days --timestring '%Y.%m.%d' --prefix netflow-