How to limit the email output from a Cron Job

Question

I have setup a cron job from cpanel to email me daily so I know the site files have been backed up. However, it emails the entire file paths and the whole job. Snippet of the email output I receive;

tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
/home/user/public_html/
/home/user/public_html/test/
/home/user/public_html/test/index.html

I really just want it to email a simple message when done, like this; Files successfully backed up at 02:00

Current Cron Job: tar -cvpzf /home/user/backups/backup_files.tar.gz /home/user/public_html

NOTES: This cron job works just fine and does the backup. I just don't want the whole job with all the file paths emailed to me (but do want a basic notification).

For my other sites I use a PHP backup script, but this doesn't work on this site as the backup file is simply too large I think for PHP to handle. The end tar.gz file is just under 4GB.

Any guidance appreciated.

Answer 1

You can remove the -v (verbose) option, and instead use the tar command's exit status to determine what message to send.

Ex. at its simplest,

tar -cpzf /home/user/backups/backup_files.tar.gz /home/user/public_html && echo "Files successfully backed up at $(date)"

or (slightly more nuanced)

tar -cpzf /home/user/backups/backup_files.tar.gz /home/user/public_html; case $? in 0) echo "Files successfully backed up at $(date)" ;; *) echo "Backup failed" ;; esac

See man tar for the meanings of various non-zero exit status values.

Answer 2

I'd suggest have the process which generates your notification be piped through

tail -n 

to parse out the last n lines, then send just that to your email.