good morning folks,

I wrote a bash script which logs into our database and generates a neato report telling me a daily breakdown of transactions per device. I launch it every morning automagically using cron (crontab -e .... enter all the parameters....). That part works just lovely.

The report output is sent to an output file (daily_report_${inputdate}.txt). The database connection/disconnection messages are all sent to my user's mail account.

Is there a way that I can NOT have any of those boring old messages sent to my mail account cause I'd rather not have to clean up garbage mail...?

thanks.

ß

sure, just redirect the script output to /dev/null...

* */5 * * * /bin/myscript 2>&1 /dev/null

You should define an empty MAILTO variable at the beginning of the crontab:

thanks for the good feedback.

I'm curious if "...myscript 2>&1 >/dev/null" would interfere with my actual report. Inside the functions I take that line of output and redirect it to my output file: >> $outfile. Would sending sterr + stout to the great void also take my report into |-|3||? I'll test it here shortly and report.

I also like the MAILTO="" idea.

Currently my crontab looks like this:
33 09 * * * bash /home/myuser/number_trans_daily

Does this look right?
MAILTO=""
...(other entries)...
33 09 * * * bash /home/myuser/number_trans_daily

it won't interfere, no. it's only what comes out to the console, which is what cron is sending you.

i wouldn't recommend changing MAILTO personally, as it's only *THIS* script you want to silent, not everything in cron.

I agree. Sorry but I did not think about other crontab entries, I was just focused on the single one. Indeed, redirection of stdout and stderr to /dev/null is far better. Thanks for taking notice!

I added "2>&1 >/dev/null" to the end of a few of my entries in the crontab and it's now working just as intended. Thanks for your help.

ß

A better idea might be just to redirect std_out to /dev/null and leave std_err alone. This way you will only get mail if some error occurs in your cronjob.