How to stop a cron job sending email

[Karl Auer]

On Fri, 2008-10-31 at 16:34 +0530, Sambit Bikas Pal wrote:
> If you want to complete disable mails from cron, add the following at
> the top of the crontab-
> MAILTO=""

In general, this is a Bad Idea.

Turning off all emailed output from cron is a good way to never find out
about stuff that is going wrong.

Scripts run from cron should handle any expected output themselves. That
will ensure that any unexpected output gets mailed to you.

Redirecting output from scripts to /dev/null in the crontab itself is a
Bad Idea for the same reason, but at least it can be applied on a
script-by-script basis. Also, you can choose to only redirect stdout, so
that unexpected output on stderr will still be mailed to you.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)

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