interesting mail problem

[Dave Hammond]

In article <705 at vector.UUCP> chip at vector.UUCP (Chip Rosenthal) writes:
>Smail is treating these diagnostics as mail headers.  I haven't fixed this
>yet.  I see a couple of approaches:
>
>(1)  Throw away /bin/mail and let cron work through SCO's /usr/bin/mail.
>     A giant step backwards.
>
>(2)  Force a blank line or a mail header at the top output from my "cron"
>     tasks.  Ugly.  This means mail messages even when there is output.
>
>(3)  Handle the output directly inside the cron task rather than letting cron
>     do it.  Kind of a pain in the neck.

Not such a pain, in the face of (1) returning to the old mailer, or
(4) replacing cron.  I'd redirect fd 2 to a log file, then mail the
log file to root (or whoever).  I don't know particulars of your cron
task, but if standard output is likewise undesireable, a quick fix is:

cron_task 2>&1 |mail root

For situations like this it would be handy to be able to redirect a
particular file descriptor to a pipeline, something on the order of:

cron_task |<2 mail root

--
Dave Hammond
daveh at marob.masa.com