[vox-tech] STDOUT and /dev/null

[Kenneth Herron]

Richard S. Crawford wrote:

> */5 * * * * wget -q http://our.server.com/admin/cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1
> 
> As I understand it, this should be directing any output from cron.php to
> /dev/null.

It only redirects standard output and standard error. It doesn't prevent 
wget from creating new files. Wget's normal behavior is to create a file 
to save the downloaded data. Redirecting standard output or standard 
error won't change that.

Wget has a "-O" option to control the name of the file that the 
downloaded data is written to. Either of these should do what you want:

wget -q -O - http://our.server.com/admin/cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

wget -q -O /dev/null http://our.server.com/admin/cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1