Hi peterr, I seem to have made you fall in love with sysopen. Fact - mostly you don't use it, you use plain open.

OK so you have this code:

open(SENDMAIL, '|/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t')
   or (unlink ($outfile),
    diehtml("Can't fork for sendmail: $!\n"));
[download]

First the syntax would usually be:

open(SENDMAIL, '|/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t')
   or do{ unlink($outfile); diehtml("Can't fork for sendmail: $!\n")};
[download]

Although what you have is valid. There are two parts to this line. The open() and the do{} joined by an or. How this works is this. If open works it returns 1 (true), if it fails it returns 0 (fail).

TRUE or do{does not get done}
FALSE or do{does get done}
[download]

Where the TRUE/FALSE return value from open determines if the or do{} gets executed.

So presuming you are right (I don't see how this will hang) there is an issue with sendmail. What the open is doing is opening a pipe | to the sendmail binary onto the filehandle SENDMAIL. You will then be doing this:

print SENDMAIL $msg
close SENDMAIL;
[download]

I presume you are sure it hangs in the open ie you have:

warn "Before SENDMAIL open\n";
open(SENDMAIL.....)
warn "After open\n";
[download]

And have checked the error logs to confirm that this is exactly the problem.....If it is really hanging on that open then I suggest you have a real probelem with your host. Remember you had hanging with another shell call to lockfile (that should not of hung either)

You can test sendmail on the command line:

[root@devel3 root]# which sendmail
/usr/sbin/sendmail
[root@devel3 root]# /usr/sbin/sendmail -t
To: root@localhost

Hello Me!
.
[root@devel3 root]# tail /var/mail/root
Received: (from root@localhost)
        by devel3.XXXXXXXXXX.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) id h933ZZq18591;
        Fri, 3 Oct 2003 03:35:35 GMT
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2003 03:35:35 GMT
From: root <root@devel3.XXXXXXXXX.org>
Message-Id: <200310030335.h933ZZq18591@devel3.XXXXXXXXX.org>
To: root@devel3.XXXXXXXXX.org

Hello Me!

[root@devel3 root]#
[download]

You can use sendmail directly as shown. The . on the line by itself lets sendmail know you are done.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.