Quick Ubuntu Package Update Script

I don’t want to have to remember to login to my syslog server and check for required updates. Here is the script I wrote and added to cron so that I don’t have to:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Email::Sender::Simple qw(sendmail);
use Email::Simple;
use Email::Sender::Transport::Sendmail qw();
use Try::Tiny;

my $to = "noc\@howfantastic.net";
my $from = "root\@syslog.howfantastic.net";
my $subject = "update script";
my $body =  `/usr/bin/apt-get update && /usr/bin/apt-get upgrade -s`;

my $email = Email::Simple->create(
    header=>[To=>$to, From=>$from,
             Subject=>$subject],
    body=>$body,
);

try {
    sendmail($email,
             {from=>$from,
             transport=>Email::Sender::Transport::Sendmail->new});
} catch {
    print "Can't send mail: $_";
}

To get this to work I needed to install some packages:

apt-get install sendmail
apt-get install libemail-sender-perl 
apt-get install libemail-simple-perl

I then added my script to cron:

root@itssys01:~# crontab -l
# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
# 
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
# 
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').# 
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
# 
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
# 
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
# 
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
# 
# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/update-check.pl > /dev/null

Now I get an email with a list of packages which would be updated were I to run the following:

/usr/bin/apt-get upgrade

I don’t want my system blindly updating itself so this way I can still check things over before committing.