what is /dev/null 2>&1 ?

[brianoz]

We weren't talking about changing scripts, just modifying it slightly so it only sends a mail on failure.

I doubt cron changed, it's possible the script is now outputting a blank line where it wasn't before. That would result in apparently empty emails where none were generated before.

You could change the cron line to do something like:

scriptname >output 2>&1 || echo ERROR $?;  grep -q . output && cat output

This will output the string ERROR if the script exits with an error, and will only send email if there is either an error or the output file is non-empty or both. The output file must have more than just blank lines to be considered non-empty. This will only help if the reason why they're receiving an empty email is that there is a blank line in it, and you haven't shown us the email so we don't know that for sure, but it's a reasonable guess as previously no emails were being generated and now they are.

Probably you'll need to either do some reading on this, or get some help scripting if this doesn't work.

[cpane1]

Thank you so much for your response, really appreciated.... I will definitely go on to try your suggestion.

However we ended up sorting up this issue by adding another script to do the job of emailing only when there is a error with MYSQL....

God knows what this clients really ask for sometimes, really tough to sort out

We weren't talking about changing scripts, just modifying it slightly so it only sends a mail on failure.

I doubt cron changed, it's possible the script is now outputting a blank line where it wasn't before. That would result in apparently empty emails where none were generated before.

You could change the cron line to do something like:

scriptname >output 2>&1 || echo ERROR $?;  grep -q . output && cat output

This will output the string ERROR if the script exits with an error, and will only send email if there is either an error or the output file is non-empty or both. The output file must have more than just blank lines to be considered non-empty. This will only help if the reason why they're receiving an empty email is that there is a blank line in it, and you haven't shown us the email so we don't know that for sure, but it's a reasonable guess as previously no emails were being generated and now they are.

Probably you'll need to either do some reading on this, or get some help scripting if this doesn't work.