Write to a log file in RHAS Linux 3.0

[Jorge Cocomess]

Greetings,

I have a cron job that goes out and modify the permission (chmod 666) on a text file once day. I would like to know how I can capture the changes in a log file? Or logs the event during as part of the cron job via e-mail.

What would you Linux expert do in my case??

Thank you in advance.

Jorge C.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom Jorge,

One way is to redirect the output of the cron job.

jobname | mail -s "my cron job" yourname@yourdoiman.com

That will send the output of the job to the email address of your choice.

Or you could jobname >> logfile sending all output of the cron job to a logfile name of your choice.

SEP

[Heironimus]

cron will normally only send mail if the command generates output, which chmod will only do if there's an error. The fact that the job ran should already show up in /var/log/cron. If you want additional logging or e-mail notification you should probably write a script that runs chmod and sends mail or writes a logfile.

[Jorge Cocomess]

I tried writing to a log file >> chmod.log but no output.

Heironimus - How would I began to write this script that will displayed the output to a log file? Do you have examples of these log files?

Thanks,

Jorge

[skt_skt]

cron log can be monirored from /var/log/cron

[Ivan Ferreira]

You have the following options:

Use the MAILTO option in crontab.
Redirect the output to a logfile, for example

5 1 * * * job.sh > /tmp/job.log 2>&1

This will redirect the standard output and error to the job.log file.

Just remember that chmod command does not provides any output.

[Jorge Cocomess]

Ivan - I did what you've suggested and I am still not getting any output in the log file.

I checked and triple checked the syntax and it was correct.

Any ideas?

Thank you.

Jorge

[skt_skt]

chmod command do not create any output.That is why you are getting none on the output file.

chmod 644 test786;ll test786 >test786.out

cat test786.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 384 Jun 4 15:52 test786

[Jorge Cocomess]

I'm confused.

If chmod command does not create output, than how did you managed to create an output with your test??

Am i missing something here?? I just need to know if my script ran successfully.

Thanks,
Jorge

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

>I just need to know if my script ran successfully.

you can check this using one of two ways:
1) ls -l your_file
you should see proper permission

2) echo $?
you should see 0 - exit code of chown