If I echo a statement and no one hears it, does it ever get echoed? (PHP cron job question)

Question

So I have a script that I debug with a bunch of echo statements. This is run every 3 minutes on my server by cron, and I sometimes leave the echo statements in there. They're not going to a browser, they're just going... anywhere?

This is a vague question I guess, but what happens when there's no end-user or output for an echo statement? Does it hog up memory? Does it just vanish? I'd appreciate any help in understanding this.

Answer 1

The answer is yes, and the output is mailed to the account that is running the cron task. You can change this in the crontab file by setting a "MAILTO=accountname" option, like this example cron file:

MAILTO=root

# run a script every hour
01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
#etc.

Any output from the above cron task would be mailed to the root user. As Mike B posted, you can also simply redirect the output elsewhere on the task line using the > operator:

01 * * * * php testscript.php > /var/log/logfile.log

in which case cron does not see it and does not send an email.

The bottom line is that if you leave some echo statements in a PHP script and set it as a cron job, then you will start getting emails from the cron daemon.

Answer 2

Yes they are outputted but to noone in particular (See zombat's answer, it's mailed to the owner of the crontask). You can write the output of your script to a file via:

php myscript.php > /var/log/cronlog.log

(Assuming you're using linux since you said cron and not scheduled task)