From: Robert Osterlund (spcberto@psyche.spc.uchicago.edu)
Date: 01/13/93


From: spcberto@psyche.spc.uchicago.edu (Robert Osterlund)
Subject: cron & mail questions
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 05:03:38 GMT


As part of a personal reminder service, I need to mail myself short
messages by way of cron. What I would like to do is the following:

* * * * * echo "<message>" | mail berto

but this doesn't work--i.e., nothing gets mailed. I have tried
several variants, including

* * * * * (echo "<message>") | mail berto

but again, no go. The following works, but it isn't "neat"

* * * * * mail berto < <messagefile>

since I have to maintain a different file for each message.

Does anyone know why echoing myself a message as in the first two
examples doesn't work? And what I should do to make it work? Echoing
DOES work in both HP-UX and SunOS but not in Linux, alas.

Also, unlike HP-UX and SunOS, after replacing a crontab with

% crontab -r <cronfile>

the new crontab doesn't seem to take effect unless and until I (as
root) kill and restart the crond. What gives?

I am running Linux 0.99, from the SLS package circa late December.

Any enlightenment would be greatly appreciated.

Bob Osterlund
berto@psyche.spc.uchicago.edu
SSPPCC--University of Chicago