====== Oh please, for the love of the gods... ======

For those short of attention span:

**Know** what you are doing, **use** what is offered to you.

Crontabs are a powerful feature of Unix operating systems. With a simple command and a line of text, you can set up a command to run repeatedly, at very precisely specified intervalls, to do your bidding.

Most people working on a Unix machine know that.

But apparently most people ignore the fact that //any output of a cronjob is automatically mailed to the user running the job//.

This is most likely due to the job run as some “technical user”, which was not configured to forward its mail to some real person.

This has several consequences:

1) A script run as cronjob should only generate output in case of error (or for some really important statistics). Forwarding all standard output to a logfile is a smart move; better even is having some rollover tool installed and //appending// the output to a logfile that contains the last X lines of output at all times.

2) Having thousands of logfiles sit around in a technical user’s unchecked mailbox is several flavors of stupid. Make sure that the mail sent out in case of error actually //reaches// someone. ''echo yourmail@yourdomain > ~/.forward''. It’s not that difficult, is it?

I had thought these two were pretty obvious. After wading through endless lists of unread tech-user mails on half a dozen servers, it seems I am mistaken.

The only thing not making me hang my head in frustration is the morbid humor of finding out that a good percentage of the cronjobs I was looking at ceased working correctly months, even //years// ago. No-one ever realized. Finding out might make me look good in front of my superiors, but it doesn’t reflect well on my trade in general…