I have certain items that are configured in my crontab to run every 15 minutes, 2 hours, and other times also, but I don't want to know everytime they run. How do I shutup cron, I get over 1 mb of email of just cron messages, always the exact same thing, it is rather annoying, and I have yet to find a way to handle this. Any ideas are greatly appreciated!

Thanks in Advance
Mike.

edit your crontab file, change the mailto line to: mailto=/dev/null or mailto=""

Thanks for such a quick response! I have done that and it works for preventing the emails from going to root, but each individual user also has access to cron and I use it as a different user, it seems that cron defaults to emailing the user of that cron job each time it is run. So for example in my crontab at one time it said MAILTO=root, I removed the root and that stopped messages going to root, but lets say I then have user Bob using cron and he doesn't want to get messages from cron how would I go about disabling that...

Thanks!

if i remember correctly, user crons are in /var/spool/cron/<username>.
logged in as a user, type crontab -l to list the contents, or crontab -e to edit. or hand edit as root.

These files are just a copy of the cronjobs for those users, they don't contain a MAILTO= directive.
:smash:

Just a thought, but does anything else use the files in these directories, or even the directories themselves? If not, then you could sym-link /var/spool/cron --> /dev/null. It's a bit of a sledge-hammer idea, but it would mean that if you created a new user you wouldn't have to edit your crontab and remove the mail bit, cron would automatically send everything to oblivion.

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly. /var/spool/cron is the directory that contains the schedule files, if I sym-link it to /dev/null I will lose my schedule files and my cron jobs.

Oh yeah. Sorry buddy - forgot. Not at my Linux box at the mo, and normally I don't use cron for much. No, but the actual mail files (/var/spool/cron/username/mail) you could. Again, it is definitely a sledgehammer regime, but then it'd probably be easier to edit the crontab and do this (a-la rshaw's method) anyway.

I would like to do it al a rshaws method but there is no way to tell it not to mail other users, that is what I am saying. In my main crontab file there is a MAILTO= directive, but in individual cron files, there is no such directive, so I can't simply tell it not to mail. Also, /var/spool/cron/[username] are files not diretories.

i don't think the mailto line is there by default, the way it is in the system crontab. do a crontab -e, and add mailto="" then save. or after each line you don't want mail from, you can enter >> /dev/null or >> /whatever/file/you /want/the/results/saved/in. use a single > to completely over-write the file each time or a double >> to add the new results at the end of the file.