procmail
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Re: track error messages to limit notification

1998-12-02 01:54:57
1998-12-01-13:39:53 David W. Tamkin:
Bennett Todd has recommended swatch, about which I am thoroughly ignorant,
so it may be better than what I'm about to suggest.

I'll expand on swatch just the teeniest little bit, but first I'll comment
that I _love_ seeing all these different strategies. The more different ways
we can find to do it, the liklier that one or another will be a good fit for a
given situation.

Swatch is a daemon. It runs in the background, examining a logfile, waiting
for new entries to show up. If you can run a daemon, then swatch may well be
the easiest and best solution; it's reasonably efficient, it's very _very_
robust (because it's massively used by SAs in high-stress settings), and it
has code that works to perform the requested sort of duplicate elimination.
It's also really simple to set up and use.

However, there are lots of settings where users cannot run a daemon, no matter
how efficient. Most ISPs don't let users run daemons (though mine does[1]). So
in a great many settings, solutions like the complex history-tracking scripts
described by others, or the very simple solution you describe with the cookie
file, are the only way to get there. Of course your cookie file solution will
only work if the user is allowed to create a cron job. But then there's that
procmail recipe intended to work sorta like cron....

-Bennett

[1] Plug: <URL:http://www.rahul.net/>

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