How can I prevent cron from filling up my root partition?

Question

I'm using cron tasks every 3 mins, the result is logged in my cron.log. Also after executing (wget) certain php file, it's name (with 0 bytes filesize) is copied to root, spaming it - see the figure

How can I prevent cron from filling up my root partition on Debian?

here is a spam screen -

My cron task is /usr/bin/wget http://mydomain.com/myphpscript.php >/dev/null 2>&1

If one of the answers solved your problem, you should mark the answers as correct. This makes the question disappear from open questions. Otherwise please update. — Jonathan, Feb 15 '12 at 10:38

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 03 '12 at 07:19

1

If you want to throw away the output of the script, tell wget to throw it away with -O /dev/null

using wget in cron to hit a php page begs the question of whether you couldn't just be running the php page with the php cli by installing the php5-cli package and running php /path/to/phpscript.php Is this really a script that needs to be accessible form both the web and from cron?

answered Feb 03 '12 at 07:19

stew

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yes, because i execute it manually from time to time after editing, much thanks! – dr_darwin Feb 03 '12 at 07:28
php /path/to/phpscript.php doesnt' work, though php5-cli is already the newest version, what's the matter? – dr_darwin Feb 03 '12 at 14:24
@dr_darwin can you be more specific than "doesn't work"? Do you get an error? if so, what? – stew Feb 03 '12 at 14:25
..i have an idea - i have restricted an access to php by ip adress. When i used wget - i allowed my.ser.ver.ip, and what will be ip adress while directly executing php file? '127.0.0.1', won't it? – dr_darwin Feb 03 '12 at 14:46
how did you make this restriction? – stew Feb 03 '12 at 15:08
by using $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] – dr_darwin Feb 03 '12 at 15:16
but it doesn't matter, i have deleted all the restrictions, set 0755 to my file, but it isn't executed by '*/1 * * * * /usr/bin/php -f /var/www/site.com/myscript.php -O /dev/null' – dr_darwin Feb 03 '12 at 15:18
@ stew BTW php is an apache module, not cgi.. may be it's the reason? – dr_darwin Feb 03 '12 at 15:20
that's all! i had wrong path to php, thankU, dear )) – dr_darwin Feb 03 '12 at 15:32

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 03 '12 at 08:03

Use -o /dev/null and -O /dev/null to throw away both the download and the output of wget.

Running it from shell as stew suggested seems better. After editing you could just run the same shell script.

It allso seems that you run your script as root. It is better to not run such scripts as root if possible.

How can I prevent cron from filling up my root partition?

2 Answers2