By default, crontab mails any output from crontab entries. Is there any way to redirect the output to std output. Like, for example, if I want to show the time on the screen every minute. * * * * * date '+The current time is %H:%M' the man pages say that the -l parameter will accomplish this but I'm unsure as to where to use this?? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Crontab is a program to maintain cron files. The cron files define jobs that cron should run at specified times. When running the command 'crontab', if you add a -l parameter, it lists the contents of the current users cron file to stdout. What you want is to get a given process to run and output the time every minute. You could use crontab to schedule the program, but the program has to do the output. But programs run by cron aren't associated with a console, so that won't work.

This works on Solaris 8: Make this crontab entry: * * * * * /path/to/script.sh > /dev/null 2>&1 Use this script: #! /bin/sh echo "The date is `date +%H:%M`" > /dev/console -jim