how to change daily cron emails to go to user account instead of root

Arthur Chance freebsd at qeng-ho.org
Sun Aug 30 12:58:44 UTC 2015


On 30/08/2015 13:29, Ernie Luzar wrote:
> Руслан Бурханов wrote:
>> man cron
>>
>>      -m mailto
>>              Overrides the default recipient for cron mail.  Each
>> crontab(5)
>>              without MAILTO explicitly set will send mail to the
>> mailto mail‐
>>              box.  Sending mail will be disabled by default if mailto
>> set to a
>>              null string, usually specified in a shell as '' or "".
>>
>> So you just can add this option on cron flags from rc.conf, like:
>>
>> cron_flags="-m 'root at mymail.com <mailto:root at mymail.com>'"
>>
>> and restart cron daemon.
> snip
>
> This method seemed the simplest so I gave it a try.
> The host has a user account called bob. I want  all cron email to go to
> bob and not root.
> I use postfix and sendmail is disabled.
>
> I put   cron_flags="-m bob"     in /etc/rc.conf and rebooted the host.
> Next morning the daily cron email still went to root.
>
> 1. Is there a way to scan rc.conf to verify all the included options are
> valid and accepted?
> 2. Since root and bob are on the same host is @mydomain really required?
> 3. Any ideas why it did not work and no errors were generated?

The periodic script does its own output using this:

output_pipe()
{
     # Where's our output going ?
     eval output=\$${1##*/}_output
     case "$output" in
     /*) pipe="cat >>$output";;
     "") pipe=cat;;
     *)  pipe="mail -E -s '$host ${2}${2:+ }${1##*/} run output' $output";;
     esac
     eval $pipe
}

You need to override the various *_output variables periodic uses in 
/etc/periodic.conf. See my earlier mail on the subject.

-- 
Those who do not learn from computing history are doomed to
GOTO 1


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