5.6 Job Output Report

Output of a crontab job can be either mailed to its owner (a traditional behavior), or reported via syslog to arbitrary facility, or appended to a disk file.

The default behavior is to send the output to the user on whose behalf the cronjob was run. This in discussed in Mailing the cronjob output.

When syslog is requested, each line of the cronjob output is sent to the syslog in real time. This setting can be enabled either globally by the use -s command line option, individually in a crontab (using the _MICRON_SYSLOG_FACILITY variable), or individually for a cronjob using the _JOB_SYSLOG_FACILITY variable.

Syslog tag can be supplied using the _JOB_SYSLOG_TAG variable (see _JOB_SYSLOG_TAG). In its absence, syslog tag is constructed from the location of the job in the crontab file and the first word of the command.

For a detailed discussion of syslog redirection, See Logging output to syslog.

Finally, the output can be captured and appended to a given disk file upon termination of the cronjob. This can be useful, e.g. when running micrond in a Docker container. See Logging output to syslog.