I've been meaning to answer this post from Jari for a long time:
| the "?" trick only allows running some additional shell commands
| (echo is one that always succeeds) while conditions above have already
| determined that drop will take place. And you can always make condition
| to succeed with:
|
| * ? misbehaving-shell-script || echo
|
| If "misbehaving-shell-script" always return failure exit code.
If the script *always* returns a failure code, just do this:
* ! ? misbehaving-shell-script
The more complex case is a script that can return either success or failure
but you don't care which; if the drop conditions passed, you want to run
the action line.
Echo can also fail if the process lacks permission or opportunity to write
to stdout. A more reliable choice is true(1); its purpose in life is to do
nothing but exit with status 0. However, there is yet a better way to make
sure that a failure by the script doesn't make procmail abort the recipe:
:0 flags
* other conditions
* 1^1 ? misbheaving-shell-script # s/b "misbehaving" but I like the typo
action
Regardless of the exit status of the script, the condition will score 1 and
not interfere with procmail's decision about the action line of the recipe.
Weighted exit code conditions behave like this (see the procmailsc(5) man
page):
* w^x ? command
scores w on success or x on failure.
* w^x ! ? command
scores the same as this:
* w^x pattern_that_appears_in_the_search_area_$?_times