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UNTITLED LOCAL UNTITLED
Jouke Witteveen

respond
automate response actions for events that are reported by a logging system (such as syslog).

respond -a FILE [-p FILE]

respond listens on stdin or on the named pipe specified by -p and matches each line it reads to the regular expressions it finds in the actionscript specified by -a. If a line matches, respond executes a rewritten command specified in the actionscript.

FILE
Specifies the actionscript (FILE) to read the actions (see below) from.
FILE
Specifies the location (FILE) of the named pipe. If the pipe does not exist it will be created for the running time of respond. For a discription of the creation of a named pipe see: mkfifo(1). respond locks the directory of the pipe and processes relative paths in the actionscript as relative to this directory.

Each line in actionscript (unless commented with '#') specifies a regular expression/command pair, sepperated by whitespace. As a result of this syntax whitespace in the expression or the command needs to be commented by either preceeding it with '\' or by placing it inside a quoted ('"') string. You need to escape '"' and '\', even when they are within quotes. In addition to this the '$'-character has special behaviour inside the command. When not escaped $n will translate to the matched subexpression n (if existing) and $0 will be replaced by the entire match. Information on subexpressions as well as on the syntax used for the regular expressions is provided in a seperate manual (re_format(7) for the default regex library).

Although respond will detach from the terminal that calls it, it is as much a daemon as it has the "~d" suffix. This means that it does, for one thing, not drop privileges. This is really a feature and not a bug since it makes it possible to control multiple actionscripts for multiple users without the need of a configuration file.

The most likely reason for respond to not start is a malformed actionscript. When a read error is reported be sure to triple check the syntax used in your actionscript. In some cases too long lines in the actionscript can also trigger a read error.

A sudden dead of respond will probably be caused by a failure reading the named pipe. Normally though, respond quits when it receives a SIGINT or SIGTERM signall from kill(1).

July 30, 2007 POSIX Compatible

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