Disabling email notifications from cron jobs

Cron sends an email whenever a cron job produces output. You can stop these emails for all cron jobs, or for one cron job at a time.

Stop emails for all cron jobs

1. Log in to cPanel.
2. In the Advanced section, click Cron Jobs.
3. Under Cron Email, delete the email address.
4. Click Update Email.

No cron job on your account will send emails after this.

Stop emails for one cron job

Add this to the end of the cron job’s command:

> /dev/null 2>&1

This sends all the command’s output, including errors, to /dev/null, where it’s discarded. For example:

15 * * * 0 /home/username/bigtask.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

To edit an existing cron job, click Edit next to it under Current Cron Jobs, update the command and click Edit Line.

Keep error emails only

If you want to hear about errors but not normal output, discard only the standard output:

15 * * * 0 /home/username/bigtask.sh > /dev/null

Tip

Instead of discarding output completely, you can save it to a log file, for example > /home/username/cron.log 2>&1. This helps when a cron job isn’t working as expected.

To start receiving emails again, remove the redirect from the command, or add an email address under Cron Email.

Related articles

• Setting up cron jobs in cPanel
• Running PHP scripts from cron jobs
• Why my cron job was changed to run every 15 minutes