Cron jobs need quiet operation

Cron jobs need quiet operation; if a command generates output, you’ll get an email from cron with the command output. So if you want to fetch a file silently with wget or curl, use a command like this:

curl –silent –output output_filename http://go.com/urltofetch.html

wget –quiet –output-document output_filename http://google.com/urltofetch.html

There are shorter versions of these options, but using the verbose options will make code or cron jobs easier to understand if you come back to them. Be aware that urls with “&” in them can confuse wget at least, so depending on your shell (bash, csh, tcsh), you may need to put single or double quotes around the url.