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Other Helper Applications

www4mail originally depended on the presence of several UNIX executables to function. However, Version 3.0 servers contain suitable codes to work around the absence or failure of the external executables; though, this reduces functionality. Also, www4mail does not require any additional Perl/CPAN packages. It will work fine with a standard installation of Perl.

When the external executables are present, they should also function correctly. The following is a list of the executables expected and how they are used:

  • lynx: Optionally used for plain text textdump and is the handler for the "ftp://", "news://", and "gopher://" protocols.

  • file: Optionally used to determine a content description of the files. www4mail runs quite well without it, but MIME attachments will not have very good descriptions.

  • split: An alternative utility to break up large files. www4mail has internal code for splitting files; however, split is defined as an alternative and should never be used.

  • zip: Needed to compress large HTML and text files.

  • gzip: Needed to compress the log files when rotating.

  • zcat: Needed to uncompress compressed HTML pages as delivered from some remote Web servers.

  • sendmail: Used to mail or post outgoing mails. www4mail has an internal SMTP mailer which may be used for direct SMTP transmission or to contact a central mail relay server. However, these may be disabled, in which case sendmail would be used to mail outgoing mail.

  • rm: May be used to delete temporary files and directories.

  • kill: May be needed to terminate child processes.

  • giftopnm: Used to convert gif images to pnm (from netpbm package) when doing HTML to Postscript conversion.

  • giftoppm: Used to convert gif images to ppm (from pbmplus package) when doing HTML to Postscript conversion.

  • convert: Used to convert images from one type to another (from ImageMagick package).

  • ghostscript: Version 5.5 and above; may be used by html2ps_Lynx.

  • ps2pdf: Used to convert from Postscript to PDF formats. For correct functioning of the GETPS command—the netpbm or pbmplus or ImageMagick tools should be available to www4mail. For correct functioning of the GETPDF command—the netpbm, pbmplus, or ImageMagick tools should be available to www4mail. The ghostscript tools (including ps2pdf) should be available to www4mail.

  • links: An alternative to Lynx, though not a complete alternative because html2ps_Lynx requires Lynx.

  • w3m: An alternative to links, though not a complete alternative.

  • uptime: Used to determine the system load average on machines without the Linux specific /proc/loadavg proc filesystem file.

  • dnsquery: Optionally used to find out MX records of remote hosts (nslookup may be used as an alternative).

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Last Update: November 17, 2020