UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi everyone:

I need to send completion (or error) message from cronjob to syslog.

How exactly this could be done?

I will appreciate step-by-step instructions: syslog.conf; code in cronjob etc.

Thanks you

Check out the man page for logger - it adds entries to the system log. The man page has examples to place messages via syslog.

I have never tried doing it in the way you suggest so I don't have step-by-step instructions via cron.

(After seeing you quote me I thought maybe I wasn't clear enough...)
1. Sign into your system
2. At your prompt, type man logger
3. Look for the examples

A cron job can be a script that is run - inside the script you can send your messages via logger. To get the completion or error codes from cron, you would have to have the output of the email cron sends - you can't send that to logger but would have to create another script.

Thanks for your reply.

Yea,

I played a little with the logger & it sends a message (or writes to a file) allright.

Now one of my crons is this:
/opt/oracle/v8/bin/exp userid/psswd parfile=/data/syndicate/prod75/admin/export/db11exp.ctl

Success could probably be hardcoded into logger like that

logger -p cron.info -f .../admin/export/exp_syslog.log Succsesful Completion

How could I place an error there?

Thanks again.

It matters what you are looking for. I've got a password script that just does an echo to the messages file on success or failure which looks something like:

echo "`date '+%h %d %T'` `hostname` chgpwd: SUCCESS changing $user passwd" >> /var/adm/messages

As far as logger - just pick a different facility.level for error and use the same type of code you did before.

The real problem is knowing if it failed or not in cron - you could redirect standard error...