Shell Programming and Scripting

Do you have super-user access? If so, the mail will be stored in files according to your system configuration (you don't tell us the distribution) but it's likely to be under /var somewhere. Perhaps one of these:-..... or something similar. Have a look at the manual page for sendmail to see if that gives you some more clues. You can then check to see if there are files in there at all (might see something whilst it is processing) or files over 24-hours old. You can use the find command for that quite nicely.


Does that help you? I'm still not convinced your plan is a good one though. What we do is to have a heartbeat e-mail. Essentially we send a note on a regular basis and someone/something alerts if it hasn't arrived.

Another alternate is you could drive the query from another server. You could write error checking there to alert you if:-If you can perform the error checking on this other server, then you could hope that it would be able to notify you, although it still depends on the common infrastructure not being the point of failure.



Robin

thanks reply ,

it helps , I know the command "mailq" can show all pending mail , what I hope to do is extract such raw data into a alert mail .

thanks

So, if mail is stuck, you still want to send an alert by e-mail..........

Unless the manual page for your mailq command gives you a flag to get the mail submission date/time, then you would be best looking in the directories I have suggested or similar to see the file date/times if any exist.

You really do need to think of another route for your alert that won't get stuck in exactly the same way as what you are trying to check up on.

If you can't think of one, then perhaps a regular e-mail that gets reported on if it doesn't arrive. Do you have a 24-hour operation that has people on site round the clock? If they have a team mailbox, then that's a good place to send it and have a check at whatever intervals that it has been received. If not, then they (people) can alert as required.



Robin