Re: cron jobs + (some?) output

[Carl Johnson <carlj@peak.org>]

Hugo Vanwoerkom <hvw59601@care2.com> writes:

> Hi Debian!
> 
> I found out something that was of interest:
> 
> I run mplayer from a script in the early morning as a cron job.
> 
> It start a script that forks and runs execve mplayer to record KUSC
> for 3 hours.
> 
> Then 3 hours later I start another cron job that kills the former.
> 
> My problem (small one) was that since there is no shell, where is the
> output?
> 
> Gues what: it gets sent to root! I found out /var/mail/mail was
> getting huge (by running mondoarchive who tried to slice it).
> In mail I find the output of the mplayer run. It is huge, filled with
> his inane % buffer filled numbers. But at the very end is the answer
> of why he dies.

That brings up the question: why are you receiving mail as root?  You
should have all root and administrative mail forwarded to some real
user.  If you read mail as user, then any virus or worm has access to
the entire system, as opposed to just the user's files.  On my system
(with exim) I have the /etc/aliases file to redirect all root and
administrative mail to my user mailbox.  I'm not sure, but I thought
that was one of the installation questions when I first installed
debian.

-- 
Carl Johnson		carlj@peak.org