freebsd-rustdate check-fetch

This does a quick check of the patchlevel the server has available, and compares it to your system. This can give you a quick check of whether the server has something new. It doesn’t do checks as thorough as fetch, but that also means it puts far less load on your system and on the freebsd-update servers.

With the -q arg, it doesn’t output anything unless it thinks you’re out of date. That’s useful when combined with the --cron argument to add a random delay to spread out load. Adding a cron job with --cron -q should cause it to quietly sit there until it sees an update, then it’ll output about it, and cron will send you that output.

See Also

fetch does a more thorough check, with a heavier load on your system and the freebsd-update servers.

cron would be how you’d run that via cron.