On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 07:54:05PM -0400, Adam wrote: > Damian Wiest <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Suppose your cron jobs don't emit output, which any good job shouldn't do. > > Huh? If you want a task to run on a schedule, and then mail you the results, > then cron is exactly what you want. Any "good job" does what its author > wants it to. If they want it to emit output, then having it be silent for > no reason does not make it a "good job". > > Adam
The way I structure my jobs, no output is _ever_ mailed by the cron daemon. Instead, the job itself traps output and sends an appropriate email message, with an appropriate subject to the appropriate user. An email message with a subject line of 'Output from "cron" job' is useless. Messages with a subject of "[SUCCESS] backup.sh" or "[FAILURE] backup.sh" are much more useful. I can filter the messages more easily, I have more confidence in a junior admin not missing an important message and I can have success and error conditions notify different people. I get daily email messages from too many jobs running as root on too many different machines for cron's default email output to be useful. -Damian
