Anyone here good with cron?

[Entity]

I just found out I had an errant crontab which was sending tons of emails to root, and consequently pissing off our postmaster a bit.

I changed the syntax...but I'm not sure how to make sure it's working properly, besides waiting for the postmaster to yell again - if he doesn't, then it's ok.

Should this work?

0 * * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/stats/pctstats >> /dev/null 2>&1

the old cron job looked like this...

0 * * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/stats/pctstats

...and was emailing all sorts of garbage to root@hostname.

Am I ok now?

Rob

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Entity
I just found out I had an errant crontab which was sending tons of emails to root, and consequently pissing off our postmaster a bit.

I changed the syntax...but I'm not sure how to make sure it's working properly, besides waiting for the postmaster to yell again - if he doesn't, then it's ok.

Should this work?

0 * * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/stats/pctstats >> /dev/null 2>&1

the old cron job looked like this...

0 * * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/stats/pctstats

...and was emailing all sorts of garbage to root@hostname.

Am I ok now?

Rob

The >> only needs to be a >, but yeah, it looks fine - stdout is going to /dev/null, and stderr is going to stdout (thus /dev/null).

 

[Entity]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey

Originally posted by: Entity
I just found out I had an errant crontab which was sending tons of emails to root, and consequently pissing off our postmaster a bit.

I changed the syntax...but I'm not sure how to make sure it's working properly, besides waiting for the postmaster to yell again - if he doesn't, then it's ok.

Should this work?

0 * * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/stats/pctstats >> /dev/null 2>&1

the old cron job looked like this...

0 * * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/stats/pctstats

...and was emailing all sorts of garbage to root@hostname.

Am I ok now?

Rob

The >> only needs to be a >, but yeah, it looks fine - stdout is going to /dev/null, and stderr is going to stdout (thus /dev/null).

Will it work as >> or >?

Rob

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Entity

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey

Originally posted by: Entity
I just found out I had an errant crontab which was sending tons of emails to root, and consequently pissing off our postmaster a bit.

I changed the syntax...but I'm not sure how to make sure it's working properly, besides waiting for the postmaster to yell again - if he doesn't, then it's ok.

Should this work?

0 * * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/stats/pctstats >> /dev/null 2>&1

the old cron job looked like this...

0 * * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/stats/pctstats

...and was emailing all sorts of garbage to root@hostname.

Am I ok now?

Rob

The >> only needs to be a >, but yeah, it looks fine - stdout is going to /dev/null, and stderr is going to stdout (thus /dev/null).

Will it work as >> or >?

Rob

It should work fine with either, ">/dev/null" is just sort of the common thing to do. > writes to a file (creates it if not there, erases prior contents) while >> appends (also creates if not there).

 

[helloedchen]

0 * * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/stats/pctstats > /dev/null 2>&1

you'll be fine with that