And yet another issue with cron.
I want to get an e-mail when something goes wrong on our servers. Especially if it’s a scheduled script that I normally don’t check that often any-more. (as you know from my previous post, some of scripts run every 10s, so even if I would check it by hand every hour, a serious backlog could already be generated). This worked very well by just creating a ‘forward’ file in the home directory of the user. ( ~/forward) which contains one e-mail address. The problem is that only the ‘from’ address will be something like hostname@domain [without any tld or something]. And our exchange server didn’t want to except e-mails coming from such a source.
After some googling and trying things I decided to give up and write my own very small script that takes care of this all.
#!/bin/bash
stuff=""
#put all output in one string
while read data; do
stuff="$stuff n $data"
done
#if string is not empty, send e-mail with contents
if [[ -n "$stuff" ]]
then
datetime=$(date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%N")
echo -e "Date: $datetime \n Trace: $stuff" | mail -s 'MESSAGE FROM CRON' -- -f
fi
This is how the mailer is called inside the crontab system:
*/10 * * * * /path/to/script 2>&1 &>/dev/null | /path/to/cronmailer
ps: if someone knows a better solution, like, how to set a ‘from’ address in cron, please tell me.. but for now this will work just fine..
[edit]
For some reason, another options just started to work. Not sure what I did wrong the first time I tried it Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Anyway, you can also set the ‘MAILFROM’ value when editing the crontab.
Just add the following to the top of your crontab:
MAILFROM=your@email.tld
Thanks Patrick for letting it me try again. But this option is only available on newer machines. (I can’t find it on rhel 5/6)
