See also my blog.

aba blogs about his wishes for post-processing of the output of cron jobs

Well, I have a wishlist as well (of course all items should be configurable):

• Save cronjob output to a file
• Append that output to log files on the system, after applying regexp filters
• Send E-Mail to a number configurable addresses
• Have a list of regexps that the output is filtered through before being included in the e-mail
• Allow the preceding operation to be done multiple times for a single mail, allowing to include different “verbosity levels” in a single message to have the admin decide which to read
• Allow certain parts of messages to be tacced (printed with line order reversed)
• Modify message subject if certain conditions are met (for including tags like [OK], [ALERT] etc)
• Allow arbitrary texts (preferably using macro expansion) in between message parts

You can implement these features using the cron-variable “MAILTO=post-processing” and an mail-alias, which is implemented like “cron-postprocessing |/my/post/processing/script”.

– Joerg Hoh