[NTLUG:Discuss] How to suppress null message body report from mail

[Patrick R. Michaud]

Neil Aggarwal wrote:

>Null message body; hope that's ok
>
>Is there a way to suppress generating this message from
>mail?  I have read the man page but I don't see anything
>that will help.

Actually, rather than trying to prevent mail from generating the
message, can you just redirect it to an appropriate black hole?
Try changing your command line to

    cat $LOG | egrep $PATTERN | /bin/mail -s $SUBJECT $RECIPIENTS >/dev/null

Even better (the "cat" seems superfluous):

    egrep $PATTERN $LOG | /bin/mail -s $SUBJECT $RECIPIENTS >/dev/null

With this, cron won't ever get any output from the mail command so
it won't send a cron report.

Pm