[plug] Running fetchmail (or any terminal program) from a web page.

[Michael Hunt]

> Hello Michael
>
> How was your holiday ? :)

Good thanks Garth. Didn't you get my last mail *grin*

> You can run fetchmail 'single shot' (not as a daemon). Eric thought of
> most things in this great piece of software and you have some very good
> return codes to examine. You can exec it and either peruse these return
> codes to generate your own output, or return the stdout/stderr back to
> the user (bit ugly).

Do you know where I can get some examples from ??? I have been inspired to
try and do some of this stuff from web based interfaces after a customers
reaction to webppp (a ppp control script that could be executed from a web
page). Our discussions about this in this past has given me lots of ideas
for doing this sort of stuff. What I could pull out of the webppp pages
should me some basic uses of exec (which has really opened my eyes up on
"how" to do some of this stuff) I am really looking for some sample codes
that I can learn off. Does the shell scripting book from orielly cover this
sort of stuff or do you know of another source. Maybe even send me some
examples Garth *grin* (By the way still gota come and see zope sometime. I
really want to get in to developing some stuff with it.

Thanks also for the advice John. I think I'll do it the way you suggested.
Just one question about how you are bringing it down. Say I run fetchmail -d
1800 in if-up, I know I can issue a kill -9 but this is a bit ugly. What are
you doing to shut it down ??? (If I leave it running it puts ugly mail
messages in the inbox about fetchamil failing etc)

Michael Hunt