Question

• TWiki version: Feb 03
• Perl version: 5.6.0
• Web server & version: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux)
• Server OS: RedHat
• Web browser & version: Mozilla 1.4b
• Client OS: WindowsXP

My question is how to best use the mailnotify script without a crontab. I have kinda figured that I can simply access cgi-bin/twiki/mailnotify?-q from a browser and it will perform the notify, but give an ugly error in the logs about a premature end of script. So, I can use a crontab on an external machine to trigger the mailings.

Is there a real workaround to this besides this little hack?

-- TWikiGuest - 14 May 2003

Answer

The mailnotify error is a bug, please log this with details of the error log messages as in SupportGuidelines.

Using crontab on an external machine should work fine, you can Google for previous pages on this issue. If you don't have crontab on the box, it's hard to see how you can do this any other way...

-- RichardDonkin - 14 May 2003

Unlike the CVS:bin/statistics script, the CVS:bin/mailnotify script is not designed to run in dual mode, e.g. you can run it only as a shell script, not as a cgi script. You get the error because the script does not return a correct httpd header. Therefore this sounds more like a FeatureEnhancementRequest then a bug. The implementation would be easy, basically copy the concept of the statistics script.

As a workaround you could write a small wrapper cgi program that executes the mailnotify script.

-- PeterThoeny - 15 May 2003

now a feature request: MailNotifyCgiScript

-- MattWilkie - 21 May 2004