Help needed please with cron timer

[birdman]

i am using a mac, and the program i am using is text wrangler ; if that helps

It helps me (to know), but I doubt that it's helping you.
In days gone by Mac systems used <CR> as and end of line marker, whereas all Unix/Linux system use <NL> (and MS Windows/DOS uses <CR><NL>). I'm assuming that this still obtains.
Mind you, the BareBones version of TextWrangler claims that it "Transparently reads and writes DOS, Unix, and Mac files".

i took out the \ but then i got the same error for line 50 :

The "\" was meant to be there - but it is vital that there are no spaces following it. It must be the final character on the line.

You haven't said what happened when you changed it to be all on one line.