[clue] tee in cronjob

[Quentin Hartman]

I have a script that looks roughly like:

now=`date +%F`
logfile = log-$now.log
while [ 1 -eq 1 ]
do
 things
  if [ $? -ne 0 ]
  then
   echo "Oh noes!" | tee -a $logfile
  fi
done

And it's run via cron, and everyday at midnight cron kills it and
relaunches it. I do this to make sure it gets restarted if something goes
Terribly Wrong, and also to rotate the log output into the next day's file.
I know I could setup a log rotate entry for it, but I wanted this to be
self-contained.

Interestingly, all of the "tee" output seems to be buffered until cron
kills the script or the script dies for some other reason. This means I
only get one email each day from cron that rolls up all the various errors
from that day in a single message. This is actually desirable behavior in
this case, but I don't understand _why_ it's happening. What if I wanted to
be email immediately when an error was detected and also log the error? I'm
not seeing anything in my usual reference materials that would explain this
behavior.

Any ideas? Is there a better way to to execute this sort of thing?

QH
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