cron job verification

[Jason Stephenson]

Larry Cook wrote:
>> On my Debian boxes, cron jobs send me an email if and only if they have
>> any output.  
> 
> 
> Also on RedHat 8 and Solaris.  I would guess that is the standard 
> behavior for all distros.

Also on Solaris, HP-UX, *BSD, etc. It's the standard for cron on UNIX or 
any UNIX-like OS.

>> Also, I believe the
>> mails are sent to root; I have an entry in /etc/aliases which actually
>> sends it to my normal user account.
> 
> 
> I think it is sent to the account that owns the crontab file, which 
> would be the account you did the "crontab -e" from.  If I want email to 
> go to a list of people I just pipe the output to mail.

In vixie cron and most others, you can specify a user to get the mail, 
it generally looks something like:

MAILTO=user at host.domain

man 5 crontab, it's enlightening.