procmail and vacation

[Per Hedeland]

In article <3efac72e$0$10836$3b214f66@usenet.univie.ac.at> Martin Paul
<martin@par.univie.ac.at> writes:

>I'm using Solaris 9, sendmail 8.12.9, procmail 3.22 and Solaris'
>vacation in /usr/bin/vacation. To enable vacation messages, I put
>this into .procmailrc:
>
> :0c
> | /usr/bin/vacation $LOGNAME
>
>This works find, but now and then I see a message like this in
>procmail's $LOGFILE:
>
> procmail: Error while writing to "/usr/bin/vacation"

But it still works, doesn't it? I think the only effect is that if this
had been a "delivering" recipe, procmail wouldn't consider it as having
done delivery, but continue through the procmailrc after "recovering" -
with a copying recipe, it's purely an informational message (and
vacation should be happy and do its job).

>Use the "i" option in procmail to ignore the errors. It seems
>to work (supress the error message), but doesn't give me a
>warm feeling (what if other, real errors happen and don't
>show up in the logfile later ?).

According to the docs, the only error it ignores is the one you're
getting - e.g. it wouldn't ignore the error of the vacation binary not
being present or not executable - and given that the error doesn't have
any effect, why worry.

--Per Hedeland
[email]per@hedeland.org[/email]

[Martin Paul]

Per Hedeland <per@hedeland.org> wrote:

> Martin Paul <martin@par.univie.ac.at> writes:

>> procmail: Error while writing to "/usr/bin/vacation"

>
> But it still works, doesn't it?

Yes.

> I think the only effect is that if this
> had been a "delivering" recipe, procmail wouldn't consider it as having
> done delivery, but continue through the procmailrc after "recovering" -

I see, so it's not going to be a problem for me, as the vacation recipe
will always be a copying recipe. Everything else doesn't make sense.

> According to the docs, the only error it ignores is the one you're
> getting - e.g. it wouldn't ignore the error of the vacation binary not
> being present or not executable - and given that the error doesn't have
> any effect, why worry.

I guess I agree on that, and will take this route. Thanks for your answer.

Sun should still fix their vacation program, to eat the complete
message before exiting, if only to be more compatible to sendmail's
vacation.

mp.
--
Martin Paul | Systems Administrator
Institute for Software Science | [email]martin@par.univie.ac.at[/email]
University of Vienna, Austria | [url]http://www.par.univie.ac.at/[/url]