Bash script to alert by email 3 times then stop.

pmpc00 · 11-02-2004, 01:39 PM

Hello,

I've written a bash script that will alert me via email(or email my pager) when the mail queue on my anti-spam/virus server gets above a certain threshold.
Currently if my mail server goes down(the next hop after the anti-virus server) then the mail will queue on the anti-virus server until my mailserver comes back online.
I have set this script to run from the crontab every 15 minutes and log the output to a file.
This has been working great but one day i took my mail server down for maintainace and eventually was alerted via pager that my mailqueue had reached the threshold. I noticed that it will continue to alert me until the queue drops down(in this case i received 20 of them...a bit annoying)

What I am looking to do is bascially receive the notification email 5 cycles before it stops notifying me while the condition exists. Then when the mail queue shrinks below my number(in this case 250) it will alert me that the queue is back down.

I've been wracking my brain and needed some scripting help with this. I don't know if there is a way to set a variable in the script that will stay active after it's done being run. (So do some sort of if # < 5 alert me, else don't)
That's where i seem to be stuck. Don't know if i should use a counter, touch a file then delete it, or what...i'm just kinda lost at this point.

Anyone have any ideas on how to do this?

tredegar · 11-03-2004, 12:17 PM

Hello.
Maybe there is an easier way, but you could try putting your "variable" into a file.
An example: I turn my computer on and off as and when I need it, maybe several times a day.
I use ntpdate to sync my local time. I do not want to do this every boot-time, just once a day. I also wanted to play with cron. So cron calls this script once an hour:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
# No need to check the time more than once a day,
# no matter how often this script is called by cron
NOW=`date | cut -b 1-10`
LAST=`cat /etc/.lasttimecheck`
if [ "$NOW" != "$LAST" ]; then
	echo $NOW > /etc/.lasttimecheck
	/usr/sbin/ntpdate time-server.kindlypeople.com
fi

My "variable" is the date the time was last checked. It is held in the file .lasttimecheck. If that is not today, the time is checked, and the file is updated.

Hope this helps.

pmpc00 · 11-04-2004, 07:23 AM

Thanks,

That definitly did it.
I guess my brain was so fried that i didn't think of setting a variable equal to a file.
The line that definitly helped me was

Code:

LAST=`cat /etc/.lasttimecheck`

Guess i was overthinking the solution.

I thank you very much for you help...it will make my week much easier now..