From owner-freebsd-questions  Mon Nov  8  6: 8:21 1999
Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Received: from laurasia.com.au (lauras.lnk.telstra.net [139.130.93.142])
	by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 00A0C14C15
	for <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>; Mon,  8 Nov 1999 06:08:13 -0800 (PST)
	(envelope-from mike@laurasia.com.au)
Received: (from mike@localhost)
	by laurasia.com.au (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id WAA08441;
	Mon, 8 Nov 1999 22:21:57 +0800 (WST)
From: Michael Kennett <mike@laurasia.com.au>
Message-Id: <199911081421.WAA08441@laurasia.com.au>
Subject: Re: daily run output
In-Reply-To: <000601bf29f0$0e3e0a60$0201010a@cmr.net> from Mark Einreinhof at "Nov 8, 99 07:49:19 am"
To: big-sky@altavista.net
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 22:21:57 +0800 (WST)
Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL32 (25)]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Precedence: bulk
X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG

Mark wrote:
>
>What does this mean in my daily run out put?
>
>Mail in local queue:
>		 Mail Queue (1 request)
>--Q-ID-- --Size-- -----Q-Time----- ------------Sender/Recipient------------
>CAA15051* (no control file)

Good question Mark.

This output has been produced by the `mailq' (1) command, and it gives a
summary of the queued mail that is awaiting delivery. So, why is there just
this one piece of mail, every night?

The daily output run is fired off from cron. If you have a look at the
/etc/crontab file, you'll see that the daily administration run is fired
off with the command:

	periodic daily 2>&1 | sendmail root

So....  the mail queue entry that you are seeing in your daily output is the
mail that is being generated by the daily run (!).

To test this, try the following from the command line (enter in the commands
prefixed with the '$' prompt; sample output is shown):

$  mailq
Mail queue is empty

$ ( echo foo ; sleep 15 ) | sendmail root  &
[1] 9246
		 Mail Queue (1 request)
--Q-ID-- --Size-- -----Q-Time----- ------------Sender/Recipient------------
WAA09246* (no control file)

$ mailq
Mail queue is empty


Hopefully you'll be able to convince yourself that the mail queue entry
reported by the daily admin. run is just the output of that admin run!


Have fun,

Mike Kennett
(mike@laurasia.com.au)



To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message