Re: Silent maintenance

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 14, 2010, 21:41 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTimLHand0g965TJmk=Y4Q+0uTFovZZRZXf9Fx4UB@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100814210556.GB2372@burratino>

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 21:05, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Enrico Weigelt wrote:
>
>> are there some flags to make the maintenance commands like
>> git-repack and git-gc silent, so they only output errors ?
>
> Does --quiet work?  If not, patches would be welcome.

I intentionally neglected to mention that. That inevitably leads to cases where something fails, but you didn't record the output.

Instead (copy/paste from a recent post of mine to an unrelated mailing list, funny how these things come up at the same time), do:

Just install this: http://search.cpan.org/dist/App-Cronjob/

Then put something like this in your crontab:

   @daily cronjob -E -j josm-build -E /path/to/build.sh

cronjob(1) will consume all the output, and either print it all or nothing, depending on the exit code of the program it's running.

If you're running a POSIX shell script you can add this to the top of the script:

   # Exit on errors
   trap 'fail' ERR
   fail () {
       code=$?
       echo "Failed with exit code $code"
       exit 1
   }

Then you don't have to check the exit code of everything individually.

I use this for all my cronjobs, see e.g. http://github.com/avar/openstreetmap-mirror for an example, it's what I use to get E-Mails when the JOSM GitHub mirror fails, but *only* when it fails.