Learn Linux Shell Scripting - Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

MAILTO

Now that we've determined we can use environment variables in our crontab by checking out both PATH and SHELL, let's look at the other very important one, MAILTO. As you might guess from the name, this variable controls where mails will be sent. As you remember, mails are sent when a command has stdout (which are pretty much all commands). That means that for every command the crontab executes, you'll probably get a local email. This, as you might suspect, can become annoying very quickly. We could suffix a nice little &> /dev/null to all commands we place in the crontab (remember, &> is Bash-specific, and would not have worked for the default Dash shell). However, this would mean that we never have any output at all, mailed or otherwise. ...