[ale] Explain Shell Script Behavior?

[Joe Knapka]

Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> 
> I noticed two unusual things:
> 
> *       I ran ktop while the script was running and while I saw wget
> executing (that's what pulls down the files), I also saw sendmail executing
> even though the condition to cause it to run was never true.

Maybe this was actually the normal sendmail deamon instance? If not,
I don't know...
 
> *       wget has some text output that scrolls up the screen if I execute it
> manually.  The reason that / filled up was because the file
> /var/spool/mail/jhubbs ("jhubbs" is the name of the account that runs the
> script) had been collecting text output from the script (including the wget
> text output), appending from each iteration of the script.
> 
> Why are these things happening, and how can I stop the accumulation of
> script output in that file (maybe add "> /dev/null" to the line in crontab)?

Yes. Cron always mails all output from commands to the owner of the
crontab file, so if you don't want that you have to redirect the
output somewhere.

-- Joe

*** Joseph Knapka ***
In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks)
are to be treated as variables.
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