Solaris

Hi,

How do we stop default cron job emails bein generated in Solaris 10?

All our cron entries are ending with /dev/null 2>&1 but still emails are being generated.

And all these emails are nuisance, as they are also get relayed to our local network sendmail MTA server (for system email alerts) and overwhelms it.

Everyday we have to delete 50,000+ email queue on our local network sendmail MTA server which is not the right way to run IT operations.

You should probably try to identify and fix the root cause instead of trying to alter a standard behavior.

Why are your cron jobs generating output while asked not to ?

Can you post a sample crontab entry that exhibit the problem ?

you could try enclosing your commands and redirecting to /dev/null (i.e., * * * * * * (some_script) > /dev/null 2>&1) or you could actually go into each script and redirect all unnecessary message outputs (i.e. "rm -f /dir/file 2> /dev/null") as well as comment out all unnecessary echo lines (i.e., "# echo 'i am here') ...

Are you cron entries ending /dev/null 2>&1 or > /dev/null 2>&1?

Without a re-direct for standard output, you are just passing /dev/null as a parameter and redirecting standard error to standard out, which will still generate an e-mail.



It might just be a typo though........



Robin

hi all,
Im hasan.kamali's team member.
here is one of the cron entry which is generating email.
1,4,7, * * * * /med/appl/orbix2/BusinessMediation/bin/start_mediationsocket_servers > /dev/null 2>&1.

and the total script count is in hundreds and it is impossible to reevaluate each single script and add > /dev/null 2>&1 this at the end of lines.

Okay, well the re-direction appears to be okay, but I presume it is writing to a different file-descriptor then. If it is code you can read, is there anything that does a >&3, or perhaps 4, 5 .... that might be causing the e-mail. You may end up suffixing your cron records like this:-

Code:

1,4,7 * * * * /your-script > /dev/null 2>&1 3>&1 4>&1 5>&1 6>&1 7>&1

I must say that it seems an odd definition to run a command on the first, fourth and seventh minute of every hour. It this really it? Well, there must be a need for it. Do you really have:-They could be confusing things too I suppose.

What do you get if you run these on the command line? If you get output, then cron will always e-mail you. I'm assuming that the purpose of the script is not to send an e-mail, of course.




Robin

run this one as the crontab user ...

Code:

crontab -l > /tmp/file
grep -v "/dev/null" -n /tmp/file > /tmp/noredirect

check /tmp/noredirect for the offending entries ... if /tmp/noredirect is empty, re-grep using "> /dev/null" as the search string ...