Why does my monthly command in my cron file does not work while daily commands do work?

I am managing a system built by third parts on a Ubuntu OS.

There is a line in a cron file which - every first day of the month at hour 07:00 - should trigger a bash script which calls an ansible playbook, and produce a log with the information about the execution.

chain of calls:

cron file -> bash script -> ansible playbook

However this does not work: the script does not run, the log does not get generated.

What is the problem ?

Context

The cron file is /etc/cron.d/ansible-cron, and the line of the case is

00 07 1 * * myuser /home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-am/collect_sale_statistics.sh >/home/myuser/var/log/collect_sale_statistics-$(date +\%Y-%m).log 2>&1

the bash script permissions are

-rwxr-xr-x 1 myuser myuser 493 Mar 23 17:42 collect_sale_statistics.sh*

and its content is

#!/bin/bash

cd /home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-am
/home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-venv/bin/ansible-playbook playbooks/collect_sale_statistics/main.yml

In my machine, the same routine is implemented for some daily and weekly playbooks which successfully work.

e.g.

The cron /etc/cron.d/ansible-cron also contains:

# collect number of reboot in the last week every monday
00 07 * * 1 myuser /home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-am/count_reboots.sh >/home/myuser/var/log/count_reboots-$(date +\%w).log 2>&1

the bash script permissions are

-rwxr-xr-x 1 myuser myuser 771 Feb  8  2023 /home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-am/count_reboots.sh*

and its content is

#!/bin/bash

cd /home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-am
/home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-venv/bin/ansible-playbook playbooks/count_reboots.yml

The script count_reboots.sh runs fine, the log is generated, etc.

error analysis

1. About the error location

What I see is that the log was not generated, so I guess that the process breaks before when or before the command in the cron is executed. <br>
So the problem must be in the cron. <br>
For sure it is not in the ansible playbook. <br>

If I manually run in the terminal

bash /home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-am/collect_sale_statistics.sh

the script runs fine, just the automatic execution which should be triggered by the cron does not start.

So I guess the problem lies somewhere between the cron file and the accessibility to the bash script.

2. About the cron syntax

I have verified on crontab.guru that 00 07 1 * * ( the cron time set for collect_sale_statistics.sh ) correctly means "At 07:00 on day-of-month 1."<br>
This message is slightly unclear, as "day-of-month 1" could be interpreted as "day-of month1", which is January, so "every day in January".<br>
However, this is not the case, as I have also verified on crontab.guru that "every day in January" is cron-transcoded as 00 07 * 1 * , for which crontab.guru indicates "At 07:00 in January.".

3. About the cron folder

I suspect the problem might be in the fact that I am placing a command which is supposed to run monthly in a folder /etc/cron.d/ which should be dedicated to cron files which should contain comands to be run daily.

However, the same cron file contains a command which is run weekly, and it runs fine.

As quoted by @GordonDavisson and by another SO thread, the manpage documentation for cron says:

...
Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless escaped with backslash (\), 
will be changed into newline characters, and all data after the 
first % will be sent to the command  as standard input.
...

so my line

00 07 1 * * myuser /home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-am/collect_sale_statistics.sh >/home/myuser/var/log/collect_sale_statistics-$(date +\%Y-%m).log 2>&1

would result in

00 07 1 * * myuser /home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-am/collect_sale_statistics.sh >/home/myuser/var/log/collect_sale_statistics-$(date +\%Y-
# new line
m).log 2>&1

and break the cron file.

In the first line above, I have added an escape (\) character before the percent sign of the month variable (%m), so now it is

00 07 1 * * myuser /home/myuser/var/myfolder/ansible-am/collect_sale_statistics.sh >/home/myuser/var/log/collect_sale_statistics-$(date +\%Y-\%m).log 2>&1