Disable crontab mail

By default, crontab on, for example, Debian, will mail any output of a job in your crontab to that user. How would one go about disabling this functionality?

From serverfault Stefan Thyberg

• There are two main ways of doing this, as I discovered.

  Either you set the MAILTO-variable to nothing at the start of the file:

  MAILTO=""
  

  or you redirect each cronjobs output to /dev/null:

  <command> > /dev/null
  

  The second having the advantage that output on stderr should still be mailed to you.

  Catherine MacInnes : If you want to also redirect stderr on a command by command basis just add '>> /dev/null' to the end of the second line.

  sleske : The second solution is much better, because that way you are still notified of any problems in crontab scripts.

  Saurabh Barjatiya : >> will append data of stdout to file. It cannot be used to redirect stderr. Use 2> to redirect stderr.
  From Stefan Thyberg

• To prevent output of both stdout and stderr use the following syntax:

  <command> > /dev/null 2>&1
  

  From Andre Miller