what does the -q flag in cron jobs do?

Question

I have a cron job on my host:

/ramdisk/bin/php5 -q /home2/sharingi/public_html/scrape/copyV2.php

That is just plain not running. The 'support' is telling me that -q is quiet mode and that is why I am not receiving any output emails of any kind...

However all my other cron jobs have been and are running with -q and have been sending me output emails... for months.

I was searching around but can't find what the -q flag does...

Answer 1

The -q flag suppresses HTTP header output. As long as your script itself does not send anything to stdout, -q will prevent cron from sending you an email every time the script runs. For example, print and echo send to stdout. Avoid using these functions if you want to prevent cron from sending you email.