Crontab - stop sending mail, special case ||

Question

I need to put into my crontab small command, which is checking, if lighttpd web server is running, for some reason it hangups sometimes. So I got there:

*      *       *       *       *       root    /bin/pgrep lighttpd || /usr/local/etc/rc.d/lighttpd restart >/dev/null 2>&1

problem is, this send me mail every minute, in the mail is number of PID of lighttpd, which is running. For other crontab job, redirection work, so I assume, when is there "||", it makes problem.

maybe there should be better to rewrite crontab job, so it uses exit status of pgrep, so I can avoid "||". I am using FreeBSD.

Thanks for any help, for now I disabled this job

Answer 1

Redirect the output of pgrep to /dev/null. All you want is the exit status.

/bin/pgrep lighttpd > /dev/null 2>&1 || /usr/local/etc/rc.d/lighttpd restart >/dev/null 2>&1