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Stefan Thyberg
Asked: 2009-07-17 06:10:53 +0800 CST

Disable crontab mail

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By default, crontab on, for example, Debian, will mail any output of a job in your crontab to that user. How would one go about disabling this functionality?

linux email cron

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There are two main ways of doing this, as I discovered.

    Either you set the MAILTO-variable to nothing at the start of the file:

    MAILTO=""

    or you redirect each cronjobs output to /dev/null:

    <command> > /dev/null

    The second having the advantage that output on stderr should still be mailed to you.

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  2. To prevent output of both stdout and stderr use the following syntax:

    <command> > /dev/null 2>&1
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