I am trying to do a few things. I have read through a
number of FAQs and have been reading this list for a little.
I have set up procmail on a shell account. It runs fine.
Filtering email into folders and stuff like that seems
pretty easy. I am having trouble where it is not just
moving email around and piping it through commands. The
procmail description says that it can be used to trigger
commands, but the syntax gets really obscure very quickly.
I will assume that this is a new procmailrc and that all
other mail will fall through to the inbox. The following
messages can be sent to /dev/null after they are finished
running their jobs. Is procmail even the right program to
use for these, or is there a better one? This account I am
posting from has email only access which is why I want to be
able to set some of these up on my other account.
1st: I would like to send a email with a specific subject
like 'send news' and have it run a script file. I already
have the script and it is currently running daily under a
cronjob and sending news updates. If the cronjob dies, as
it seems to do occasionally, and I notice it, I would like
to have it run before I can get home and check the problem,
so all it would need to do is run $HOME/bin/new.sum. Once
the script is running, it knows where to get stuff and send
it on its own. I have tried some of the sample recipes for
autoresponders and file servers, but they assume the file is
already on your system and not being created at the time.
2nd: I would like to run another script that runs another
script called $HOME/bin/daily_weather. I would like this
one to run the script and send the output to the address
that sent it. Subject could be 'send weather'.
3rd: Since this account gets lots of junk email, and I
don't have access to nslookup, traceroute and whois, I would
like to be able to do this by email. Can I send a email
with a subject 'whois 205.199.212.21' or 'traceroute
205.199.212.21' and have it send me the output of that
command. It should only run these three commands.
Reply privately if you don't think these are relevant to the
list. I could also send a summary of the recipes that work
to the list after they have been tested out.
Thank you for your help,
Kerry Nice