RESPOND(1) BSD General Commands Manual RESPOND(1)Jouke WitteveenNAMErespond — automate response actions for events that are reported by a
logging system (such as syslog).
SYNOPSISrespond-a FILE [-p FILE]
DESCRIPTIONrespond 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 pro‐
cesses 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 action‐
script. 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 action‐
script 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
