Comments on: Disable The Mail Alert By Crontab Command

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:43:19 +0000

Thanks for the tip, works great to disable cron emails.

By: Howard

Howard — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:39:34 +0000

Will this work for the at command as well?
I’m trying to setup a series of commands that check for a condition and then reschedule themselves until it’s not true. The problem is every run sends an email to root, I need to stop that.

By: kthx

kthx — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 04:02:11 +0000

MAILTO=”" is the best solution :P

Thanks for the tip ;)

By: kthx

kthx — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 04:01:12 +0000

Hahaha just stop there for a while lol….

By: Rosario

Rosario — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 18:11:44 +0000

@IIker, Have a look at your

/etc/postfix/sender_canonical
/etc/aliases

and reload with

/etc/postfix/postmap sender_canonical

/etc/postalias aliases

with aliases you can send mails to root and other addresses without putting it in the MAILTO in crontab. That’s how I was told to do it and it works on my servers.

By: Ilker

Ilker — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 06:46:01 +0000

Hi,
I wrote to the top of my crontab file
MAILTO=”myadress@gmail.com”

and the outputs of commands are not coming to my gmail adress. Why?

Thank you.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 17:52:04 +0000

Hi Vivek, great tip, thank you!

The correct way to restart crond in HP-UX is:

# /sbin/init.d/cron stop
# /sbin/init.d/cron start

Best regards.

By: Fredrik

Fredrik — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:24:24 +0000

@Frank

Sure, use the MAILTO=”" trick, just don’t put “”

MAILTO=”frank@example.com”

By: Frank

Frank — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 08:22:37 +0000

I would like to know where I can adjust the email address of cron’s mail? Apparently I set an email address somewhere when I installed the server, but I’m unable to find where I can adjust that email address. I’m running debian lenny. Can someone help me here?

By: Bud

Bud — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:57:39 +0000

Thank you OP and Anand Sharma

By: Anoni Mouse

Anoni Mouse — Sun, 09 May 2010 13:35:35 +0000

It is not required to restart cron to effect changes to your crontab. Each time cron wakes up, it checks to see if the crontab has changed, and if so cron reparses it.

By: Petr Topiarz alias kolaloka

Petr Topiarz alias kolaloka — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:43:53 +0000

Thank you Edward,
your “> /dev/null” was the only option that did the job for me. I run and adminster 3 servers with OpenBSD 4.3-5 and the cron did not like any other stuff but what you wrote. Thanks a lot. You saved me a lot of work.
Peter

By: edward baddouh

edward baddouh — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:27:43 +0000

It’ll be better if you redirect only the std output to /dev/null instead redirecting both (stdout & stderr). This way only commands with failure exit status will be delivered.

* * * * /path/to/script.sh > /dev/null

regards,

By: Vivek Gite

Vivek Gite — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:38:24 +0000

@ slowpoison

Thanks for the heads-up.

By: slowpoison

slowpoison — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:58:30 +0000

Is it MAILTO or EMAILTO?
Only MAILTO worked for me. I think EMAILTO is wrong.

By: Sebastián Perrone

Sebastián Perrone — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:32:41 +0000

I try MAILTO environment var and work ok. Thanks for help !

By: Phil

Phil — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 12:10:06 +0000

If you want the crontab to run daily, weekley, monthly etc.. a good shortcut is to use the variables

@daily, @weekley etc…

It saves you accidently missing out a * and getting thousands of emails by mistake

http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?crontab+5

for a full list of them

By: Matt Balloon

Matt Balloon — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:23:26 +0000

I used your tip for my openads installation, thanks, I think cronjobs are pretty complicated things

By: Prolific Programmer

Prolific Programmer — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:09:26 +0000

For the csh scripts, at least on every system I have access to, to redirect stderr, you need to put >& /dev/null after the command, not &> as indicated by the note.

By: Gopal

Gopal — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:26:31 +0000

But if you have so many cron jobs and you want disable mail alert for a few of them, while other jobs needs a mail alert, then &>/dev/null would be the best choice.

Thanks