Email from user www-data
I have some occasion to run some cron jobs as the user www-data. It
would be nice to get any output with my regular cron output.
What I found is that the email was sent to www-data. postfix was
dumping the email because it couldn't find procmail. Had it found
procmail, I suspect it would have delivered it to /var/mail/www-data,
or wherever procmail delivered it.
I came up with two work-arounds.
* /etc/aliases has an alias for user www (to root), but not for
www-data. There is no user www. A quick edit, and run of newaliases
allowed postfix to send www-data's mail to root.
* Add an environment variable, 'MAILTO="root@<redacted>"' to the cron
file that defines the relevant cron jobs.
I think the first work-around is the more general, but the latter less
intrusive.
I should probably file a bug for whichever program set that particular
alias. However,
root@hawk:~# apt-file search etc/aliases
xemacs21-support: /usr/share/xemacs-21.4.24/etc/aliases.ksh
root@hawk:~#
I suspected the package to be apache2, but that does not appear to be
the case. That alias is present on boxen with no web server. Can anyone
tell me which package, if any, provides /etc/aliases?
--
Does anybody read signatures any more?
https://charlescurley.com
https://charlescurley.com/blog/
Reply to: