Re: Cron Daemon backup message too big

[Haines Brown <brownh@hartford-hwp.com>]

Someone kindly communicated to me privately, and I realized that I was
not being sufficiently complete regarding my problem. 

In my backup script, I have the line:

  find / -print | egrep -v "^/media|... " 2>&1 | cat -vt

What this command does is to concatenate stdout + errors and redirect
them to a terminal. This works fine when I call the command # backup.

However, when cron calls it, there's no terminal to which to send the
stdout, and so apparently it is redirected by default to a mail
message. 

Could I avoid this by terminating the command line instead like this:

  2>&1 /home/brownh/backup.log | cat -vt 

Here I clobber the contents of backup.log, which is what I want. Is the
syntax right? Will it avoid sending stdout to a mail message?

My guess is that when I upgraded to etch, cron stdout was redirected by
default to a mail message. That's OK, except in this case it causes
exim4 to complain about the size of the message and terminate the find
command. 

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM