How To Disable Crontab Output and Email Notifications

How can I disable email alerts from cron jobs? How can I disable wget to create a new file each time? Why I am receiving too many e-mails to my root account from crontab?. This tutorial will help you to disable crontab output and email notifications.

I have run multiple crontabs on my Linux system for regular tasks like backups, data processing, etc. Each time the cron job run sends a new email to me. Also, there are some wget commands configured in crontab which is creating a huge number of files under the home directory.

Suppress Cronjob Output and Logs

You can easily suppress the output of any cronjob by redirecting output to /dev/null. You can do this by appending >/dev/null 2>&1 to cronjob, for which you want to suppress output.

0 2 * * * /home/backup.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

• The >/dev/null tells the cron to send all output (STDOUT) to /dev/null
• The 2>@1 tells the cron to send all errors (STDERR) to same as (STDOUT)

This is more useful for the cron jobs running wget command. I have a cron job with wget run every minute. Which creates a new file each time wget runs with crontab under the home directory. So I configured it as below and now my home is clean.

0 2 * * * wget -q -O /dev/null  http://example.com/cron.php

Using MAILTO Option

You can disable the email notification for cronjob by setting MAILTO=」」. You can also set the same variable to some other email to send an email specified from the specific job.

MAILTO=""
0 2 * * * /home/backup.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

MAILTO="[email protected]"
0 2 * * * /home/backup.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

Thank you for reading this tutorial. You may also like our tutorial Crontab in Linux with 20 useful examples for scheduling cron jobs.