changing cron's From: address in emails

[Kelly Martin]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 11:19 AM, krad <kraduk at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> On Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:08:21 -0600
>> Kelly Martin <kellymartin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Greetings, here's a simple question for the FreeBSD gurus out there. I
>> > have several servers running cron scripts daily for me, and they all
>> > send me e-mail with their output. Regardless of which server it is,
>> > each of these e-mails have the From: address looking exactly the same.
>> > They all say they are from the "Cron Daemon". Fine, but I'd like to
>> > know more clearly which server the cron output is from.
>> >
>> > How can I change the From: address of these emails to "Myserver Cron
>> > Daemon" instead? I know cron runs as the user, so it's not immediately
>> > obvious to me how to change the From: field. Already the subject line
>> > says something like "Cron <root at Myserver> ..." but this doesn't stand
>> > out enough for my tired eyes.
>
> The simplist way to do it is get you scripts to print out a to, from and
> subject line at the top of their output containing the information you want.
> eg
>
> To: your at mailbox.com
> From: scriptname at hostname.com
> Subject: scriptname, hostname
>
> other script output
>
>
> Then in the cron pipe the output into sendmail with the t flag
>
> eg
>
> 1 1 * * * somescript 2>&1 | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t
>
> you will then get the loverly named emails

That is very cool, thank-you! It works beautifully.

And as a bonus I've learned something new about how to e-mail the
output from my scripts, which can be useful for all sorts of things.

Kelly