> Being fundamentally ignorant of Linux and its wily ways I am, once
> again, stymied. I entered sendmail -q &`, as you suggested and got
> lines that seemed like a continuation of the command line.
This is going to be tough for you. Pick up a UNIX shell tutorial
book, or it's going to be a pain.
Just remove the quotes, they're just there for prettiness in the e-
mail. Your entire command line should look like:
# sendmail -q &
All the '&' does, BTW, is put the command in the background so you
don't have to wait for it to finish (e.g. the shell prompt returns
immediately). You can leave it off if you like.
Also, if you ever run into the situation where you've accidentally
put a quote or something on a line, and the shell asks for more, try
just terminating the quote, e.g.:
# sendmail -q &'
> '
The shell expects these things in pairs, and assumes that you aren't
done until it sees the 2nd one. Of course, backticks are a
different story...
> Actually, what I did was an Access query on a FoxPro dbf...
> Then I sent out an announcement to the list whereupon the
> complaints rolled in about receiving everything in quadruplicate.
Good lord, I'd rather shoot myself. So much for automation.
Try taking a look at the list file by hand, e.g. in vi or vedit or
pico or emacs, or whatever you actually know how to use (vi will be
present on your system, but is tough on the unwary. Hint: <Esc>, :,
q, <Enter>). Webmin may have done something very strange.
>
> Does majordomo automatically send a copy of each message to both the
> list and each e-mail address? That would account for the duplicates.
Er, what does that mean? You should send to the list, simple as
that, the list name gets *replaced by* the list of names in the list
file. If you also have everybody's name in your To: field, of course
they're going to get multiple copies.
> > > > interested in my newlist3.pl script. Take a look at
> > > > ftp://ftp.ccsf.org/majordomo-contrib/newlist3.pl.gz
>
> I downloaded the script to my WinDoze box and examined it. I put it in
> the majordomo directory and tried running the script. Here's what I
> got:
>
> A list will be created as test@narsil.nbtanet.org
> This list will try to use for data.
> cannot open for read.
The script won't work for you unless you've set up your system to
match. You would have to edit it to reflect your local environment,
which I suspect you aren't quite up to, since it's written in Perl.
> > I have never used a GUI to admin anything. I hear webmin is
> > pretty good. Hard for me to say what happened either.
>
> How do I prevent this from happening again? I REALLY pissed off a lot
> of people yesterday.
Well, we don't know what caused it yet. Try a similar operation but
only put yourself and a couple other people who won't mind in the new
list, and see if it happens again. It always helps to test before
you go to production ;)
In the meantime, you have a lot of reading to do on basic UNIX
sysadmin stuff. It might seem a bit of a PITA at first, but once you
get used to it, you'll think "why the heck did I ever do this in
Windows?" Heh heh.
P.S. If you want to attach your aliases file(s), your list files, or
anything else to an e-mail and send them to me, I can check them over
for you.
Dave C
---------------------------------------------------------
David Corlette mailto:corlette@huarp.harvard.edu
(617)495-5922 http://www-arp.harvard.edu
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