Answering prompts in a cron tab

Most commands that you are likely to run from cron should have some type of flag that can be passed to them so they run with requiring any interaction. Occasionally, you run into a piece of software that doesn't have a "silent" option. For example, if you have a cron setup to run: /bin/runthis and there is no flag you can pass to prevent it from asking: Are you sure (y/n)? the app won't work as a cron tab on its own. One solution is to pipe the "yes" command with the app like so: yes | /bin/runthis The yes command will answer with the "y" for you. "yes" just keeps feeding "y"s until it exits. If you need you can even pass it another string. For example, "yes working" will pass "working" until it exits.