Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!rice!sun-spots-request
From: arisco%cadillac.cad.mcc.com@mcc.com (John Arisco)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Re: cron in sunos 4.0
Keywords: Software
Message-ID: <8903212134.AA13565@cadillac.cad.mcc.com>
Date: 4 Apr 89 08:24:51 GMT
Sender: usenet@rice.edu
Organization: Sun-Spots
Lines: 19
Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu
Original-Date: Tue, 21 Mar 89 15:34:52 CST
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 223, message 2 of 15

> Is there any way to shut the d*mn program up ?
> To take a potshot, what ever happened to the Unix philosophy that
> said programs should NEVER be needlessly chatty?

Actually, this is a rather nice feature of 4.0.  It does not make sense
for a cron job to produce any output, so 4.0 allows for this to be handled
as a special case, and mails the output to you.  To shut the noise up,
just make sure that nothing in your crontab produces any output.

We found the big offender to be "find" with a path argument of /.  Note
that /usr/lib/find/updatedb does one of these.  Just prepend " >/dev/null
2>&1" to these lines in your crontab. 

I did not like 4.0 cron at first, but now I really appreciate it.  I
especially like the idea of private crontabs for each user and the
crontab(1) command to manipulate them.

 John Arisco, MCC CAD Program | ARPA: arisco@mcc.com | Phone: [512] 338-3576
 Box 200195, Austin, TX 78720 | UUCP: ...!cs.utexas.edu!milano!cadillac!arisco