A few days ago I created a cron job in my /etc/crontab file. This was the only modification made to the file. Ever since then, I recieve about 20 emails per day that look as follows:
/etc/crontab is as follows:
I would love to know what is cuasing this and how to make it stop. Any advice is appreciated.

Any output (on STDERR or STDOUT) from a cronjob gets emailed to you. What happening is cron is trying to run a command call root which is then failing. How have you been editing your crontab? With crontab -e? Typically each user has a crontab rather than a single large crontab that lists the users. What do you get when you run crontab -l (thats an lower case L by the way) as root?

cheers

Jamie...

It sounds like you have an error in the script that runs at the bottom and the output is causing cron to send you an email (as stated above).

Check the script and if you need to just put the about put to /dev/null.

I manually edited /etc/crontab using vi to add the job. when I use crontab -e, it appears to give me the exact same file that is in /etc/crontab. AFAICT, my script works perfectly. I can execute the script just fine manually.
If this were the case, wouldn't the emails coming to me reference /home/php/parse/my_script1 rather than "root nice -19..."? And wouldn't they only come to me once a day rather than several time during the day? I'm not trying to shoot you down here because I genuinely do not know the answers to these questions.

I recon you want to run crontab -e and remove just have 00 5 * * * /home/php/parse/my_script1 in your user specific crontab.

cheres

Jamie...

Could you please clarify that a bit? Do I or don't I want anything but this line in crontab -e? This is a server that I am not logged into most of the time, so I want to make sure that it will still be run even if no users are logged in. Thanks for your help!

crontab -e will allow you to edit the current user's crontab. This is typcially where you schedule things to run.

cheers

Jamie...

Sorry, I meant the part above. Do I want to remove the my_script1 line from crontab -e or make that the only line in their?

Since you edited the system crontab wich is /etc/crontab
instead of
00 5 * * * /home/php/parse/my_script1
it should be
00 5 * * * root /home/php/parse/my_script1

Oh, man, from:

"/bin/bash: root: command not found"

it really seems clear that you should erase the term 'root' inside the crontab:

01 * * * * root nice -n 19 run-parts /etc/cron.hourly

Cron is trying to execute a command named "root", which of course, doesn't exist. Try:

01 * * * * nice -n 19 run-parts /etc/cron.hourly


- On another matter of things, the execution of cron jobs always mails the user with the results, wherever it ends in success or not.
If you want it disabled, you have to define a environment variable MAILTO and leave it empty.

The easiest will be to add a line like this at the end of /etc/profile, or /root/.bashrc

MAILTO=""; export MAILTO

pablob:
TruckStuff has modified the system crontab! The correct syntax is to include the username (wich is ususally root) in each line. Your post applies to a user crontab!