| Headlines |
| 2018-06-15 |
Hiding successful cron output |
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System administrators have always faced a challenge when it comes to dealing with scheduled tasks. Specifically, each task that runs likely generates output which is e-mailed to the administrator. Most of the messages will be simple confirmations that everything went according to plan, but sometimes the output will indicate something went wrong. It is not a good idea to discard all of the messages and it can be cumbersome to set up filters to deal with the torrent of e-mails. Job Snijders has published a patch for OpenBSD's implementation of cron which allows the administrator to discard all output in cases where jobs complete successfully, but also be e-mailed a command's complete output if the job fails. "To improve the situation I propose to add a simple crontab(5) convenience option called '-n' (mnemonic 'No mail if run successful'). Note that options already are a thing in vixie cron ('-q' has existed for decades?), but are not part of POSIX. With this 'no mail if success' option you can do things like: * * * * * -n cp -rv src/ dest/ With the above example crontab(5) entry you'll only receive a mail from cron(8) if the cp(1) encountered some kind of error. You'll also have in that e-mail up until what point cp(1) actually was able to copy files." The NetBSD team has already adopted the new cron feature. |
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