Hello,
Newlist has a problem.

When run in interactive mode, it will output the necessary entries

for the Sendmail 'aliases' file. That is very nice.

However, I am not usually in an X-Window session, so I can't use a

mouse to cut'n'paste those entries into my /etc/aliases. It's very annoying.

The attached version will print all *informational* messages to

stderr, not stdout. Only the 'aliases' entries are printed to stdout. So now, all I need to do is

./newlist >> /etc/aliases

(or ./newlist > tempfile.txt ; cat tempfile >> /etc/aliases.  You

get the idea.) I will still get prompted (if in interactive mode), but the prompts will be printed to stderr, and all the aliases will go to stdout (and hence redirect into my file).

If I run in non-interactive mode, and put all the necessary

variables on the command line, then the only output (to stdout) is the aliases. All other behaviour is unchanged.

This also makes it much easier to write automated shell scripts

and CGI programs to create new lists, because there's no messy sed to parse out the informational messages.

The attached file is the new version of newlist, created off

2.0beta5. Feel free to create a diff of it if that is your preferred format.

Note that I presented this same patch for beta2 but it was never

incorporated, so I assume the maintainers aren't interested in this feature. In short: You have to grab this and keep updating it yourself if you want to use it in future versions of MailMan.

Thanks, Derek Simkowiak dereks@kd-dev.com