Does Debian have any utility to address the following situation? I have some scripts that I run both manually and as cron jobs. The scripts generate stdout/stderr output reporting what they're doing.
I want to see the output when I run the scripts manually. However, when the scripts are run by cron, normally I don't want cron to e-mail me that bulky output for each run--I want the output (the full output) only when the output is different than expected (e.g., if something has gone wrong or has changed, which I want to notice). I started to write a wrapper script to take a command to execute and a file of regular expressions defining expected output lines (like logcheck's ignore files), to run the command and check against those regular expressions, and to either suppress the output if everything is as expected or emit all output if anything isn't as expected. Since Debian has logcheck with its exclusions for log-file checking, I thought maybe there's something with similar (regarding expected patterns) for cron job commands. Thanks, Daniel -- (Plain text sometimes corrupted to HTML "courtesy" of Microsoft Exchange.) [F]
