cron question

[Eric Harvill_1]

Is there a way to prevent a single cron entry from sending an email whenever it completes? Thanks...

Eric

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

redirect the output to file or then use mailx to send it as a e-mail. Or write a script to do cron job and send e-mail after competion of job

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Eric,

The easist thing to do is redirect your scrit's stdout and stderr to /dev/null.

[Eric Harvill_1]

I've actually tried that and it doesn't seem to be working. Perhaps my syntax is wrong? Here is the entry:

15,30,45,00 * * * * /opt/sysadm/bin/check_printer atlpsih8k1 2>&1 /dev/null

Thanks.

Eric

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Not wuite the correct syntax to redirect all output to /dev/null. The correct syntax is to first redirect stdout and then assign stderr to stdout:

...check_printer atlpsih8k1 1>/dev/null 2>&1

It must be in that order as the shell assigns things as it parses them, left to right. 2>&1 followed by > /dev/null means that stderr would be assigned to whatever stdout was, and then stdout is assigned /dev/null (stderr is still assigned to the original output file).

[Eric Harvill_1]

Bill, thank you for the correct syntax.