If you must edit your original question, then please don't change the meaning. If someone comes to this thread in a years time they won't know what you originally asked.

In answer to your second question, pipe symbols (|) should be OK in your crontab, but personally, if I am doing anything remotely complex in a cronjob, I always write a script, and then call it from cron.

The reason is that any job called directly from cron gets a very simple shell with hardly any features, and not much environment set-up, so stuff that works from your normal command line sometimes does not from cron. If you call a script you can put a hash-bang line in to bash, and then set-up your PATH and the rest of your environment explicitly, so everything works.