crontab

mkoco · 01-06-2010, 11:20 AM

Hi all,
I'm new to mail via the CLI, so bear with me. I have this line in my crontab:

Code:

*/5 * * * * fetchmail

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:

Code:

Fetchmail: no mail for me@there.who at pop.whatever.net
Fetchmail: 2 messages for metoo@nohere.themoon at pop.megadeuce.pillow
reading messages for metoo@nohere.themoon....

..etc

This doesn't happen when I run fetchmail by hand.

Any clue?

Nylex · 01-06-2010, 11:24 AM

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

Woodsman · 01-06-2010, 03:39 PM

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."

devnull10 · 01-06-2010, 03:52 PM

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.