Direct Cron Output in Text

carlosinfl · 04-29-2010, 08:08 AM

My server has no MTA (Postfix, Sendmail, Exim) installed so it can't email me the results of any cron job I schedule. I would then like to have the results from Cron be dumped into a small text file so I can read it later to view any issues.

Right now my job is as follows:

Code:

01 18 * * * /usr/bin/shellscript.sh

Above you see my script I want to run every day @ 6:01 pm. My question is what would the cron line look like if I wanted the results dumped into a random text file somewhere on my system?

colucix · 04-29-2010, 08:20 AM

You can redirect both the standard error and the standard output to a file with the current date in its name, e.g. something like this:

Code:

1 18 * * * /usr/bin/shellscript.sh > /path/to/$(date +\%Y\%m\%d)_cron.log 2>&1

Alternatively, you can put the following line of code at the beginning of the script itself:

Code:

exec > /path/to/$(date +%Y%m%d)_cron.log 2>&1

that has exactly the same purpose.