Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 16:16:24 +0100 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: Paulo Roberto <nirv199@yahoo.com> Cc: "D. Penev" <dpenev@mail.bg>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: starting fetchmail from ppp.linkup on FreeBSD 4.6 Message-ID: <20020728151624.GB94488@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophi> In-Reply-To: <20020728134345.52515.qmail@web14910.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20020728100127.GA371@earth.dpsca.bg> <20020728134345.52515.qmail@web14910.mail.yahoo.com>
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On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 06:43:45AM -0700, Paulo Roberto wrote:
> --- "D. Penev" <dpenev@mail.bg> wrote:
> > and try
> > this in ppp.linkup:
> >
> > ! /usr/local/bin/fetchmail -d <interval>
>
> Should I drop the 'sh' after the '!'??
> BTW what is this '!' for? From my understanding I am not denying any
> argument... (I didn't find it on the manual...)
It's '!' with the meaning of "shell escape", as you get in eg. the ftp
program, not '!' meaning 'not' as you get in most programming
languages. If you think it's too confusing use the ppp 'shell'
command instead:
shell /usr/local/bin/fetchmail ...
Similarly, to have commands executed in the background, you can use
either of:
bg command
!bg command
The meaning is exactly the same.
Saying '! sh foo' means that you want ppp to invoke a shell to run the
'sh' program, and have 'sh' run 'foo' for you. If that all seems
needlessly complicated, that's because it is --- using sh like that is
pretty redundant. The great exception to that is to use 'sh -c' to
run compound commands interpreting shell meta-characters:
shell sh -c "[ -d dir ] || mkdir dir ; cat > dir/foo"
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks
Savill Way
Tel: +44 1628 476614 Marlow
Fax: +44 0870 0522645 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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