Cron.php help - what does /dev/null 2>&1 do?

[monsta]

I'm trying to find out why my incoming email cron job isn't running.

I have added the line to crontab and restarted the service.

It's still not running. I tried running it from the command line and it appears to work ok but still the job doesn't run.

If I run cron.php on it's own I get a mysql connection error.

What does the > /dev/null 2>&1 bit do?

[tdp]

That pretty much dumps any output to the null device, i.e. it throws it away. If you remove that, cron should email you the results of running the job (provided you have a mailserver enabled).