During my six days off-line waiting for computer repair, Danny Howard wrote,
| The latter pipe, though ... that doesn't get munged in the log at all
and nobody seems to have explained that in the meanwhile.
I think Danny meant that the first pipe command was shown in the verbose
logfile with commas between each two arguments, while the second pipe was
not. The commas are procmail's way of indicating that it invoked the command
itself; the absence of commas is its way of showing that it needed to call
$SHELL to run the command, since something about it was beyond procmail's
power -- filename globbing, redirection of a file descriptor, sequencing
commands, conjunctive or disjunctive logic, or backgrounding for some
examples. In Danny's case, the second command had semicolons (sequencing)
and a pipe (redirecting -- the pipe symbol at the far left to indicate
feeding the message to a command doesn't count, but the pipe symbol between
the formail;cat parenthesis and sendmail does).
If commands that don't need a shell work while those that do need one fail,
the value of $SHELL is the first place to look. It was no surprise that
setting it to /bin/sh instead of letting it default to his login shell solved
the problem.
_______________________________________________
procmail mailing list
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail