[H-GEN] Cron Jobs and Logs

Michael Anthon michael at anthon.net
Tue Feb 17 06:23:24 EST 2004


Greg Black wrote:

>
>
>It can be done, but mail(1) is actually designed as a mail
>reader, so it's a stretch to do what you want.
>  
>
Well, it's not a "reader" as such, it's a very hard to use MUA... the 
man page says

 >DESCRIPTION
 >     mail is an intelligent mail processing system which has a command 
syntax
 >     reminiscent of ed(1) with lines replaced by messages.

I have used it in various places where I've wanted to send output 
quickly and simply.  The easiest way is to pipe data into it or redirect 
a file for it's stdin and set a subject and address on the command line 
like so...

    some_script | mail me at home.com -s "Output from script"
    mail me at home.com -S "Some random file" < random_file

Works a treat and no need to manually generate headers (not that I'm 
claiming this way produces terribly good headers but it's suitable for 
most purposes where you might want to do this).

That said, the cron process, as Greg mentioned, should be sending you 
anything from stdout or stderr of the processes that it runs.  The email 
will be sent to the owner of the cron job in question unless you 
override that with the MAILTO option in the crontab file (man 5 
crontab).  If you aren't seeing emails from cron when you expect to see 
them then you may not have the email system set up correctly... you do 
have a mail alias set up for the root user on your system don't you?

Cheers,
Michael





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