Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I am using "fetchmail" and "procmail" combination to trigger a job based on an input mail.Using fetchmail, incoming mail is downloaded from the mailserver to the local host.Once the mail is flushed,procmail starts execution and thereby triggers the application script.

In-between this process,a file under the name "mbox" is created in the home directory.file type is "ASCII mail text".This file has all the mails listed received by the account.

Can anybody say which program configuration is responsible for this?
Is it fetchmail or procmail or the mail program configuration files.

Regards
Dileep

Could be either; depends on how you configured them. It doesn't look like any default value of Procmail's but maybe your system is configured to set up Procmail that way. Do you get log files? By your description, I guess fetchmail doesn't write anything, but passes everything to procmail; and in the absence of any explicit configuration, Procmail will write to where-ever $DEFAULT points to.

Yes.I got some hints like.After the completion of the job, a mail was sent to the user or the account under which the job is running with a "complete" message.

As usual i got a console messge like "You have a mail in /var/spool/mail/arunb".After i check my mail and exit the mailbox with "q" command i got the message like

"Message 11:
From arunb@seq20.kl03.com Tue May 20 08:05:23 2008
Date: Tue, 20 May 2008 08:05:22 -0400
From: "BArun" <arunb@seq20.kl03.com>
Subject: Output from your job 232
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

complete

? q
Saved 1 message in mbox
Held 10 messages in /var/spool/mail/arunb"

So i think it is something to do with the mail configuration.
Can anypne track this, please help me to avoid this

Regards
Dileep

Finally i got the source of that message.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION :

It is the default behaviour of the "mail" utility to write all the read but undeleted mails to a file.The default file is "mbox" under the home directory.

extract from man mail
"You can end a mail session with the quit `q ' ) command. Messages which have been examined go to your mbox file unless they have been deleted in which case they are discarded. Unexamined messages go back to the post office."

This will happen once you quit the mailbox after reading mail and without deleting the read mails.

"quit
(q ) Terminates the session, saving all undeleted, unsaved messages in the user's mbox file in his login directory, preserving all messages marked with hold or preserve or never referenced in his system mailbox, and removing all other messages from his system mailbox."

Regards
Dileep