Re: SSH with non-default key

[Mark W. Eichin]

>>  -e "ssh -o'IdentityFile2 ~/.ssh/xxkey'"

sure, that causes you to pass
 - o ' I d e n t i t y F i l e 2   ~ / . s s h / x x k e y '

(spaces inserted to emphasize the literal nature of the characters)
as arg 1 to ssh; the ~ isn't going to get expanded, because you've quoted it
sufficiently that a shell never sees it...  an explicit path, removing
layers of quotes as you ended up doing, or just expecting the cronjob
to be cd'ed into your homedir and dropping the ~ / from the string...