Re: [EXIM] Problems calling externat programs

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Rick Williams
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [EXIM] Problems calling externat programs
On Thu, 6 May 1999, Rick Williams wrote:

> I have been trying to post some automated programs from the old 
> sendmail server over. Both the files were called from the `aliases` 
> file ie prog1:    "|/usr/local/bin/program1". The first program was a 
> C program to generate a list of all the current email addresses and 
> who they belonged to and the second was a Perl program that 
> send a single email to all users on the system. Neither of the 
> programs work now properly. I do not claim to be a programmer, so 
> I got some help from our senoir programmer but to no avail.
> The messages I am getting in error are "Child returned error code 
> 1" and "process failed (1) when writing error message to 
> r_williams@??? (frozen)"

>
> Does anybody know what I'm doing wrong.... or maybe it's the
> programs I'm running that are *!?%. Is there another way of donig it?


The program you are running terminated with an error code of 1. Exim
treats this as an error. It expects pipe commands to end with a zero
error code. So, the problem is in /usr/local/bin/program1. What you need
to do is send a test message with debugging turned on to see what other
information Exim gives you. Something like

exim -d9 aliasname
Test message
.

where aliasname is the alias that runs that pipe. Another problem is why
it failed to write an error message to you. That sounds as if there was
a problem in created another process, but I can't think why that should
be.

-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@???      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.



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