Procmail FAQ
This directory is the home of a Procmail FAQ.
As most actively maintained documents, it is always more or less
"under construction".
There are several mirrors of this site. Please use the mirrors if you can.
- North America
-
http://mirror.ncsa.uiuc.edu/procmail-faq/
-
http://www.zer0.org/procmail/
-
http://www.moongroup.com/docs/procmail/
-
http://www.linuxguru.com/docs/faq/procmail/
- Europe
-
http://www.xs4all.nl/~sister/mirror/procmail/
The URL of the original site is
http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/
Here is a listing of the pages you'll find here:
- Procmail FAQ
-
"Main Course"
-
- Procmail mailing list resources
-
Stuff related to the Procmail mailing list at Aachen.
-
-
The list is run on the SmartList system and the help files here
are mostly the default SmartList ones.
-
-
Incidentally, SmartList just happens to run on top of Procmail.
- Files from the Procmail distribution
-
These files are here for easy reference, but might
not be the newest versions. The autoritative source is
http://www.procmail.org/
which also has e.g. a complete unpacked source tree for
Procmail and SmartList.
-
Local copies of the following files are kept here:
-
The "original" Procmail FAQ
by Procmail's author, Stephen van den Berg.
This "original FAQ" is still maintained as part of the Procmail
distribution,
but targets a somewhat different audience than the mini-FAQ.
(The HTML version here is not "official";
there is also a copy of the
text-only original
from the 3.11pre7 distribution.)
-
The manual pages from v3.11pre7 (crude col -b format);
procmail(1),
procmailex(5),
procmailrc(5),
procmailsc(5),
formail(1),
and
lockfile(1)
Please note that some things in the man pages
are site-specific. You really should attempt
to get the man pages installed locally.
-
Various other documents from the Procmail distribution;
-
Revision history for these pages
-
As indicated, this is work in progress.
I very much appreciate
any kind of feedback on this
(broken links, broken examples, broken English ...
or anything else you wish to comment on).
Mail me if you wish to contribute!
Here's where to
download Procmail:
http://www.procmail.org/
(make sure to get the latest stable version, which is
still 3.13.1. There are some minor bugs in 3.14. There
should be a 3.14.1 forthcoming shortly).
There is also a
list of mirrors on the Links page.
If you have material which matches any of the following,
or think you can help implement any of these ideas,
please
contact me.
For the FAQ
-
What to remove :-)
-
Break out a "cookbook" with interesting recipes on its own page
-
More known bugs and gotchas
-
Perhaps not for this FAQ, but would be useful to have somewhere:
Discussion of Tower of Babel terminology for resending a message
("bounce" vs. "forward" vs. "resend" vs. "regurgitate" ...)
-
Mail folder formats should perhaps also be separated out into
its own little FAQ or something
-
Move more newbie-level material (e.g. efficiency tips)
towards beginning
For the Links page
-
Does anybody keep a surfable copy of the Best Of archive on-line?
(This is nominally available at
http://members.xoom.com/procmail/best-of-procmail-list/
but not very surfable, frankly speaking.)
-
Better newbie links
(Is there anyplace better than Yahoo or
dmoz.org
to start looking?
There must be introductory texts about
shell programming
and
regular expressions
that are actually not bad
and/or tied to a very specific environment)
-
Is there anything for converting the rahul.net patterns to
Procmail format?
-
Clarify for myself what the distinction between "newbie" and "rocket science"
really should be
-
"Virtual Best Of" with links to good articles in the archives?
Actually the "Pearls" section is a good start.
For the Quick Reference Guide
-
Definition of deliveredness
-
All the possible sicko scoring variations
(
x^y < number
,
x^y ! ? pipeline
, etc)
-
What characters need to be backslash-escaped
(simple to do, but where do I put it :-)
-
How Procmail's regex operators differ from Perl's and egrep's
-
Note that timeouts are lower bounds
-
Proofread && check:
LOGFILE
,
TRAP
,
$*
-
Common mistakes and how to avoid them
(kind of based on some stuff in the FAQ
and on stuff people often misunderstand)
For the author
-
A good Regular Expression FAQ anywhere that I could link to?
-
Time to do a good lint for Procmail
(Alan Stebbens's library contains a simple one.
Unfortunately, it's too simple to be of real use. IMHO, of course.)
-
Grammer && fakt chekr
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