Shell Programming and Scripting

I have written a number of shell scripts which I have added to cron to run on an Apple Xserve running MAc OS Server 10.4.11.

Recently I configured postfix to use one of my company's email servers as a relay so that it can send out statistics about the number of jobs my shell scripts have processed.

The problem is that I've just brought the email server to its knees when it received approx 45,000 mail from the Xserve, I can only assume that these mail must be legacy messages from cron which the server has now decided to send via the email server. So

1. Does anyone know why these messages for the local administrator account are now routed via the external email server

2. How can I stop cron sending out messages to administrator

Thanks in advance for any help as my eMail admin wants to crucify me!!!

You can tell all cron jobs to redirect their output and stderr to /dev/null.

Code:

* * * * * cronjob.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

Of course, then you will see nothing from the crons.

Meanwhile, how is mail configured? Do you have an /etc/aliases file? (I very little about MacOS)

Thanks Otheus

I assume that I would have to add dev/null redirect to each and every cronjob within the crontab.

I found another solution which is adding EMAILTO="" to the start of the crontab, I haven't had chance to test it yet, so I'm not 100% sure if it works

With regard to mail configuration, I have used postfix act as a relay to our mail system (Lotus Notes). There is an /etc/aliases file but postfix adds aliases using its mail.rc file - this works sucessfully