wskibum has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi all,
I am a newbie at Perl, nuf said there I guess.

I have a need to move my log files around and I am using a simple perl scp script to do this. Now I need to add some error reporting to the script and I am in over my head.

1: I need to send an email when scp cannot connect to a server
2: I need to send and email if scp cannot find the file to download How can I get the error codes on a failure and what do I do with it?

Please help me out if you can, I've been searching the web with no luck for 2 days.

currently my scp command looks something like this: 

GET THE FILE WITH SCP
#

$filetoget="$LOGFILEDIR/$f\.@FILEDOMAIN\$i\.$year-$mon-$mday";

$command = "/usr/bin/scp $a:$filetoget $f\.@FILEDOMAIN\$i\.$year$mon$m
+day\.$a";

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: help with scp error codes
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Mar 16, 2008 at 08:18 UTC

    On my system, scp return an error code on error. ("DIAGNOSTICS: scp exits with 0 on success or >0 if an error occurred.") system returns and sets $? to a value that contains the exit code of the process it launched. 

    my $filetoget = "$f.\@FILEDOMAIN$i.$year-$mon-$mday";

my @cmd = (
   '/usr/bin/scp',
   "$a:$LOGFILEDIR/$filetoget",
   "$filetoget.$a",
);

my $rv = system(@cmd);
if ($rv == -1) {
   print("Unable to execute scp: $!\n");
} elsif ($rv & 127) {
   printf("scp died with signal %d\n", ($rv & 127));
} elseif {$rv >> 8) {
   printf("scp exited with error %d\n", ($rv >> 8));
} else {
   print("scp was successful\n");
}

    [download]

    As for the email part, MIME::Lite should do the trick.

    Update: Oops, was missing scp's 2nd arg.

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      MIME::Lite is a fine (and more reliable) option, but seeing we are just shelling out to scp why not just invoke sendmail directly by opening a pipe and sending it the required data: 

      my $sendmail = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t";

open MAIL, "|$sendmail" or die "Cannot open $sendmail: $!";
print MAIL <<EMAIL;
Reply-to: $reply_to
Subject: $subject
To: $send_to
Content-type: text/plain

$content
.

EMAIL
close MAIL;

      [download]
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Re: help with scp error codes
by apl (Monsignor) on Mar 16, 2008 at 13:35 UTC
    Another way of e-mailing to user@host.com is by calling: 
    sub Mail
{
    my ( $Msg ) = @_;
    my $Hdr = "From:  Speaker to Users\n".
          "To:    <user\@host.com>\n".
          "Subject: End of Day problems\n\n";

    open( SENDMAIL, "|/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t -odq")
       or die( "Can't fork for sendmail: $! \n" );

    print SENDMAIL $Hdr.$Msg;
    close(SENDMAIL) or warn "sendmail didn't close correctly!";
}

    [download]
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