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Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:31:31 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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To: Julio Emanuel <costaju AT gmail DOT com>
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Subject: Re: cron and mail: a stupid question (please don't kill me)
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Julio Emanuel wrote:

> I've searched a bit already, and have been through the cron, ssmtp,
> and crontab manpages. Still, there is something that I don't quite
> understand: why on earth the cron job's output are put in e-mails??

cron was written with the intention of being able to run jobs for normal
users, not just sysadmins.  How else is it supposed to notify a user
that a job it ran on that users behalf completed with errors?  Users
might not have access to the system logs and even if they did they
almost certainly wouldn't know or think to check them.  But on a
traditional unix system every user does have a local mail spool file and
users are accustomed to reading email, so it's a pretty natural fit.

But cron itself really doesn't know anything about email per se, it just
knows that when the job outputs to stderr, it pipes that output to a
"/usr/sbin/sendmail", whatever that is.  That is typically a symlink to
something that sends mail but it doesn't have to be.

> All I want to do is:
> a) have some jobs running unnatended and scheduled; (apparently done,
> whith some simple tests)
> b) have the output of this jobs LOGGED, preferably on syslog, with
> some identification of the process who generated it; (don't have a
> clue??!)

Did you read /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/cron-*.README?  It explains cronlog
which if symlinked as sendmail will log the output.

Alternatively, you can do whatever you want with your job's output by
redirecting or piping stdout and/or stderr to a location or program of
your choice directly in the crontab entry.  There's nothing that says
you need to let cron handle it.  You can use 'logger' if you want that
location to be the syslog.

Brian

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