At 11:09 PM -0400 10/5/00, Linda Wack is rumored to have typed:
I have a list that often will go a day or so without any posts, which unhinges the next 2pm digest delivery.
Er...if you have nothing to send, why would you want to send it in the first place?
I've created it manually a few times and found that this helps the digest delivery.
Yeah, I imagine it does; as the Manual clearly notes, .digest.force will force a digest release at the next invocation of flush_digests.
But how do I automatically create this file on a daily basis?
man touch
How do I do this?
In your shell script, called by cron: 1) chdir to your list directory 2) Check to see if you have anything in there to send by checking for the existance of archive/digest.body (man test will help here) 3) touch .digest.force 4) ../.bin/cronlist Although, personally, I think that's a complete waste of time and energy. Doesn't it make more sense to set the cronjob that calls .bin/cronlist to run four times a day, and set the timeout of the digest release around 20-to-22-hours? That way, you'll never run more than a day past when the first message hits the list, and won't be sending out tiny digests just because you want them released at one specific time per day. Unless you have an overriding reason for the digests to be released at a specific time (for example, offloading bandwidth usage to 2:00am or something), in which case you'd want to set your digest age and size variables in rc.custom to some whacked-out high number so it would _never_ be released automatically, and then control the entire process through the cron job. But that just seems unnecessary and wasteful to me under normal conditions. Charlie