In a dozen or so years of administrating many different Unix machines, I've never had cron email be a problem and I get a few (useful) emails from various cron scripts every day.
This interacts badly with many unix commands, which often send status info to standard out. Some commands have a quiet options, but that can turn off all error output too.
Maybe it's that I've mostly been administrating BSD machines, and so most of the tools follow old Unix guidelines like not printing anything unless it's necessary, echoing errors to stderr, using proper exit statuses, etc. (http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/interfaces.html) I think it's a GNUism/Linuxism that commands are overly chatty, writing junk all over stdout (like author/license information - do we need to see this every single time?), and using ANSI colors by default.
Which tools are you talking about? The standard software suite is basically identical between the systems. And what differences there are lie in the implementations of the core stuff, whose behavior is specified by POSIX for the most part.
I'm sure there are exceptions somewhere. But in something you'd throw into a cron job? Frankly, that seems like a very weird snipe.
Debian has this as well. I do "unalias -a" whenever I log into an account I haven't configured to my liking yet (I want no ls coloring, but I do want a bash prompt in boldface).
I remember getting an angry email from someone because of this when I was back at uni, had just finishing installing a linux box at home, but hadn't finished configuring everything. I went to bed while it was busily running cron jobs throughout the remainder of the night and emailing the output to someone else who had the same username at my ISP as the local one I'd set up on the machine. I don't think he saw the funny side of it sadly.
This interacts badly with many unix commands, which often send status info to standard out. Some commands have a quiet options, but that can turn off all error output too.
Maybe it's that I've mostly been administrating BSD machines, and so most of the tools follow old Unix guidelines like not printing anything unless it's necessary, echoing errors to stderr, using proper exit statuses, etc. (http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/interfaces.html) I think it's a GNUism/Linuxism that commands are overly chatty, writing junk all over stdout (like author/license information - do we need to see this every single time?), and using ANSI colors by default.