Someone kindly communicated to me privately, and I realized that I was not being sufficiently complete regarding my problem.
In my backup script, I have the line: find / -print | egrep -v "^/media|... " 2>&1 | cat -vt What this command does is to concatenate stdout + errors and redirect them to a terminal. This works fine when I call the command # backup. However, when cron calls it, there's no terminal to which to send the stdout, and so apparently it is redirected by default to a mail message. Could I avoid this by terminating the command line instead like this: 2>&1 /home/brownh/backup.log | cat -vt Here I clobber the contents of backup.log, which is what I want. Is the syntax right? Will it avoid sending stdout to a mail message? My guess is that when I upgraded to etch, cron stdout was redirected by default to a mail message. That's OK, except in this case it causes exim4 to complain about the size of the message and terminate the find command. -- Haines Brown, KB1GRM -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]