writing to file newbie question

misterjingo · 09-26-2005, 08:07 AM

Hi all, i've got smoothwall setup on a box and have a Dshield submittion mod loaded. As a cron job I submit my logs every two hours as such:

0 */12 * * * root /usr/local/bin/submitdshieldlogs.pl >>/var/log/mailog

How could I attach a command to this so it also logs the time to the file too?
Also I've seen the above command with '2>&1' attached to it. What does this do exactly? Also, if I used the above command and added >/dev/null instead of the maillog, is the intention of this to dump any output of the command before it?

Wim Sturkenboom · 09-26-2005, 08:25 AM

2>&1
standard error (2) is redirected to standard output (1)

>/dev/null
will redirect the standard output to the null-device (a black hole); output will not be displayed on screen.

no reply with regards to timestamp

misterjingo · 09-26-2005, 10:04 AM

Thanks for that. I've altered the perl script being called to append localtime() to the output. But if anyone knows how to concat a command such as clock to be written to the output file (or even if such a thing is possible) it would be great to know.

jrdioko · 09-26-2005, 02:59 PM

How about something like

Code:

`date` >> blah

(those are `'s, not ''s)