Crontab is not emailing me errors

Asked Jun 19 '21 at 23:57

Active Feb 22 '23 at 14:39

Viewed 277 times

I have a script called cron-test.sh with a line of code to trigger an error:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Cron Tab is Running"
asdfadsf

My crontab -e has this:

* * * * * /home/user/cron-test.sh

I can't seem to get any emails of the error in my script, I know email configuration is set up properly because I tested the following in crontab -e and I get emails every minute telling me "Cron Tab is Running".

MAILTO="[email protected]"
* * * * * /home/user/cron-test.sh

How do I receive an email when an error occurs.

edited Feb 22 '23 at 14:39

asked Jun 19 '21 at 23:57

lightstream

1

Does this answer your question? How to make crontab email me with output? – user68186 Jun 20 '21 at 00:15
Are you asking why your MAILTO environment variable needs to be set explicitly in the crontab, rather than being inherited from somewhere? – steeldriver Jun 20 '21 at 01:30
My understanding is that crontab by default will automatically email me when there's an error with the script it runs. When I have "asdfadsf" in my script, that throws an error. However, crontab is not emailing me that this script threw an error. – lightstream Jun 20 '21 at 02:02
1

Without a MAILTO variable, AFAIK it will attempt to mail to the crontab's owner locally, using something equivalent to [email protected]. The mail should end up in /var/mail/user (although for that to work, you need a full mail server running on the localhost I think - rather than a mail forwarder such as ssmtp or the like). – steeldriver Jun 20 '21 at 10:39
Thank you @steeldriver – lightstream Jun 21 '21 at 12:40

Crontab is not emailing me errors

0 Answers0