Troubleshooting

Batch Jobs

When a LISTSERV server receives command mail (that is, LISTSERV commands sent to a server via e-mail) it will execute the commands and mail the results back to the sender. See the section Sending Commands to LISTSERV for more details on command mail. LISTSERV will tolerate only a certain number of unknown commands or syntax errors from a command mail. If this threshold is reached, processing of the command mail is stopped and any remaining commands will not be executed. There may be cases when users sending commands to LISTSERV via e-mail will not have any commands executed due to an excess of errors found in the mail before any commands are reached. This can happen when mailing systems automatically insert text at the top of mail messages as they are posted and provide no means for disabling this process. This text is read by the LISTSERV server and each line is counted as an error until the threshold is reached and processing for the command mail is stopped. To deal with this and similar situations, LISTSERV has its own Command Job Language whereby commands to be executed can be presented in a special format. Commands sent to LISTSERV in this manner are known as batch jobs. For example, if you wanted to send the SHOW VERSION and LIST commands for execution on the LISTSERV at SEARN, you could construct the following batch job:

     // JOB
     SHOW VERSION
     LIST
     // EOJ

and then send it to that server. The first line in the above example indicates the start of a batch job. LISTSERV will recognise this and totally ignore any lines in the body of the mail message that precede it. Following this, any number of LISTSERV commands may be entered (one per line) and these will be processed normally. A batch job is ended by the appearance of the last line (as shown in the example above). For more information about the LISTSERV Command Job Language, send the command GET LISTJOB MEMO to your nearest (or any) LISTSERV server.

The MAIL Prefix

There may be times when you send a command to a LISTSERV server and wish to have the command output returned to you via e-mail. This will always be the case for users not on the EARN/BITNET network since they can only communicate with LISTSERV servers with command mail (see the section Sending Commands to LISTSERV for more information). EARN/BITNET users, however, may send commands to a server via interactive messages. In this case, LISTSERV will return most command output also via interactive messages that will be displayed on screen. For commands that generate a large amount of output, the MAIL prefix can be used to direct LISTSERV to send this output to you as e-mail instead of to your screen. To do this, the command MAIL is prefixed to the beginning of any LISTSERV command. For example, the SHOW DPATHS * command returns a large amount of information. This can be sent via e-mail with the following command:

MAIL SHOW DPATHS *

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