Cronjobs on long-unattended servers

This is probably obvious to the system administrators out there, but it's interesting to note the impact when you don't pipe the output (both stdout and stderr) of a cron job to /dev/null.

Every time the task runs, it emails its output to the account owner. If this happens every 5 minutes, that's 288 times a day or about a hundred thousand after a year.

If you intend that server -- and the cronjob running on it -- to be running for a long time without intervention, do yourself a favor and send the output to the null device. Or else you'll wind up with gigabytes in /var/mail.