Silent Cron

[arvind]

Is there some way to surpress output from a cron being emailed to you ? I want the output from other crons to be emailed just not from one, is that possible ? I have tried adding

 

>-silent

 

at the end but it makes no difference

 

Thanks

[MikeJ]

Cron jobs only generate email when there's output from the process. The best way is to create the process that is being run in cron to only output errors. (Note: this is true for running programs in Linux and most Unixes in general, not just from cron.)

 

If that's not possible, you can redirect regular output (and only get emails on error output) using the following format:

>program > /dev/null

 

This redirects (>) standard output to a null device (/dev/null), which means it supresses it.

 

If you want to suppress all output including errors:

>program > /dev/null 2>&1

 

This has the addition of redirecting standard error (2) to standard output (1) which is being redirected to a null device (/dev/null), therefore suppressing both errors and regular output.

[arvind]

Thanks Mike. So can I just add that to the end of my current cron command to surpress the errors ?

 

UPDATE: OK I understood how to do it, heh !