hey all, I am having a little issue with mail being sent to me to: /var/spool/mail/josh (where josh is my username).
I understand this is happening because of something i have done in a script i have written, where i have the output of some commands being redirected to another file. Everytime the script execute, which i have a cron running every 5 min, i get this message:

you have new mail in /var/spool/mail/josh

Is there a way to stop mail from automatically being sent to me??? how can i stop this??

Thanks.
josh

Yes there is. Don't output anything in your script.

but if i want to, is there a way to stop the auto mail?????

Duh??
That doesn't make sense.

Or, in other words:
-If you don't want the output to be delivered by mail, what is the difference in not outputing anything and outputing something to a place nobody can ever see? How you can distinguish the two from eachother?

What is wrong with adding "> /dev/null" to the end of your line in crontab to make your script to not output anything?

my wording may be off. I have a script to run :

temp = `cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature`

Which is placed in an other file for my own interests.

echo $temp >> /home/josh/recordtemp

also in the scipt, (just for argument sake), if i want to echo something out to the terminal. and NOT have it sent to /var/spool/mail/josh, is this possible??? Adding > /dev/null to the end of the echo line, will prevent anything from being output to the term window??? Thanks.

josh

Let's say we have a script called "a_script", and it contains:
and you want to run this script as itself, and you want to run it as a cronjob. Also those "other things" generate some output to the screen.

Now, to crontab, we put a line
Now the there comes no output -> no mail.

Maybe I'm I missing something here.
If you ask: Can a cron job output something to the terminal, then answer is no. Why not? Because it has no terminal where to output; cron has no way to know which of the (maybe open) ttys the output should be directed to.

If you ask: Can a cron job work without sending me mail all the time, then answer is yes. That can be archieved eg. by using the methods described above.

If you are trying to figure out how to do something else, you probably have to explain some more and/or again.

THANKS!! i think my issue is now cleared up.. any other, for instances, echo statements contained anywhere within the script will not generate output to the terminal, nor will i be sent mail to /var/spool/mail/USER... If this is correct. haha, i am all set in my ways. thanks for the clarificiation.

Josh