I have a cron job which will copy some files and such. From time to time it will start failing due to an inaccessible host. When it starts failing, I'd like to get notified - but I don't want an email every 5 minutes telling me that the problem is ongoing.
I can think of ways to kludge up a solution, but I wonder if this functionality exists somewhere already? Server is OSX, but I only have shell access to it.