"Hey bronto! We would like to monitor our mail queues in *COMMERCIAL_PRODUCT* with a custom plugin. We need to extract from the mailq command the name of the queue and how many messages are in. There must be also an header and a footer. How would you do it?"

This way, with a one-liner:

mailq | perl -ne 'BEGIN { print "HEADER\n" } ; END { print "FOOTER\n" } ; /^\s*(\S+)\s+(?:is empty|\((\d+) requests?\))/ and print $1," ",$2||0,"\n"'

Ciao!
--bronto

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

In reply to Watching mail queues by bronto

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.