I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this question but.......

I've set up a cron job on redhat and set it up to send stdout to one log file and stderr to another... for example:

0 7,13,19 * * * /root/scripttorun.sh >/root/scripttorun.log 2> /root/error.log

I'm also setting up a script to mail the error.log file if it exists

perl /root/smtp_send.pl -t user@domain.co.uk -s " Error for script on $HOSTNAME" -a /root/error.log

(smtp_send.pl uses MIME::Lite - the -t,-s -a are variables which get feed in to perl script to specify who the mail should goto, what the sibject is and what file to attach)

I really only want the cron job to create error.log if there are actually any errors but everytime the cron job runs it creates an empty error.log.

Is this what you would expect to see??? i.e will it always create an empty error.log file? Can anyone suggest a way to amend the second script so it only attched the file if is is larger than 0kb?

Thanks,

Emma

Hi,

Cron is not the program that creates the error log, the command given to cron does. The error.log needs to be created so that errors (if any) can be written to it, which is logical if you think about it.

When executing this command: /root/scripttorun.sh >/root/scripttorun.log 2> /root/error.log the shell does 3 things (it does a lot more, but I'm keeping it simple).

1) create error.log (the 2> /root/error.log part)
2) create scripttorun.log (the >/root/scripttorun.log part)
3) scripttorun.sh is started and output can now be redirected to one of the log files.

To solve your problem you need to check if the error.log is empty and act accordingly, which probably means expanding the perl script (or create a new script that includes the smtp_send.pl functionality).

Hope this clears things up.

Thanks for confirming that. Wasnt sure if it was something i was doing wrong! But looks like it'll always create the error log even if no errors are passed to it.

Will try and work out a way of only running the perl script if the error log is greater than 0

Thanks for your help,

Emma

Hi,

Bash has the -s option (True if file exists and has a size greater than zero). Something like this could be of use:

[ -s file ] && echo "File is not empty"

The echo part is only executed if the -s file part is true.

Perl has this functionality as well (it's also -s if I'm not mistaken).

Hope this helps.

Just found out i can use "if test -s /root/error.log" to do this.

Thanks

Emma


WHOOPS = just realised i must have missed your last post!! Thanks