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mike
Asked: 2009-06-30 14:07:33 +0800 CST

Override MAILTO for a single crontab entry

  • 772

We have a role account at work that has a pretty big crontab. Its MAILTO is pointed at a shared address, so that a number of us get notified if something fails.

I'd like to add an entry to this crontab, but I only want myself to be notified if something goes wrong. Is there a way to change MAILTO for this one entry, or otherwise accomplish my goal?

unix cron

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can always just do:

    MAILTO=you
* * * ...  your cron job
MAILTO=normal.destination
    • 21

  2. You can always pipe all output to the mail command with the correct address in a subshell. As long as there is nothing on STDOUT or STDERR cron will not send the email

    10 * * * * sh -c 'thisonecommand 2>&1 | mail [email protected]'

    • 10

  3. I can't recall if cron preparses the file to read in the environment vars, so I'm not sure if you can change MAILTO multiple times in a single file. But you can always split it to another file and put it in /etc/cron.d/foo with a [email protected].

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