Shami's Blog

In my previous post I discussed how I use a wrapper script to back up a fleet of servers.

Here I will just post the part about detecting the terminal/CRON, thought this might be useful and worth putting in a separate post making it easier for crawlers to find.

if [ ! -t 1 ]; then     # We don't have a terminal, then we are in cron
    # Script running in cron, run without output
else
    # Script running interactively, use verbose output
fi

This script is POSIX shell compliant so runs everywhere.