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UNTITLED                             LOCAL                            UNTITLED


Jouke Witteveen


NAME

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


SYNOPSIS

     respond -a FILE [-p FILE]


DESCRIPTION

     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.


OPTIONS

     -a FILE  Specifies the actionscript (FILE) to read the actions (see
              below) from.

     -p 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.


ACTIONSCRIPT SNTAX

     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).


DIAGNOSTICS

     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.


TROUBLESHOOTING

     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).

POSIX Compatible                 July 30, 2007                POSIX Compatible

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