crontab - fetchmail sends output to mail spool
 

Hi all,
I'm new to mail via the CLI, so bear with me. I have this line in my crontab:
Which does check my mail every 5 minutes fine. But I get the command-line output mailed to me every 5 minutes as well. So I get a message in my mail spool every 5 minutes containing something like:
This doesn't happen when I run fetchmail by hand.

Any clue?

cron sends output to you by default. I'm not sure whether you can change it, but the simple solution is just to redirect the output to /dev/null. This is what I do:

*/1 * * * * /usr/bin/fetchmail -K > /dev/null 2>&1

From the stock crontab for root:

"If you don't want the output of a cron job mailed to you, you have to direct any output to /dev/null."

:)

Just for info, I set fetchmail up by create an rc.fetchmail file in /etc/rc.d and then linking to that in rc.local. It isn't recommended that you run as root however I found this to be the way I preferred to have it running. It allows me to stop, start and restart whenever I want just as you do with any other daemon.