How to prevent cron from spamming syslog?

Question

I have a cronjob that has to be run every minute. And every minute cron add a new line into syslog about that. How can I suppress this behavior?

Answer 1

First, backup syslog.conf:

sudo cp /etc/syslog.conf /etc/syslog.conf.backup

Then, open up syslog.conf in your editor of choice, and change this:

*.*;auth,authpriv.none          -/var/log/syslog

to this:

*.*;auth,authpriv.none,cron.none          -/var/log/syslog

although the caveat is that you cannot check if your job is running.

Answer 2

redirect standard output into /dev/null, while if you going get an error you'll receive an email about it:

shell.script.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

Answer 3

For rsyslog, you can filter messages like this:

:msg, startswith, "(your-login) CMD (command" ~

in the /etc/rsyslog.conf file. Take notice the tilde at the end.