FAXANSWER(8)

✨ FAXANSWER — the manual, but make it make sense ✨

okay so real talk, bestie: this is faxanswer(8), from the System Manager's Manual. yes it's an old-school Unix page. no it's not boring. it's giving "your modem is literally waiting by the phone and you have to tell it to pick up." let's go 💅

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💖 NAME 💖

faxanswer — tell a HylaFAX server to answer the telephone. that's it. that's the whole job. iconic behavior honestly.

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

/usr/sbin/faxanswer [ -q queue-dir ] [ -h how ] modem

look at her. small. powerful. takes basically nothing to run. 👑

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the vibe: faxanswer sends a message to the HylaFAX faxgetty(8) process that's servicing modem, and that message is basically "girl, pick up the phone." 📞✨

when is this useful? picture it: the modem is sharing a phone line with actual humans, and the server is configured to not normally answer the phone. so when you do want it to pick up, you have to say so. that's this command. no cap.

now, the modem you pass in — you've got two options, and both slay:

• the name — typically the last component of the terminal port the modem is attached to
• the full name of the associated FIFO named pipe file — like `FIFO.ttym2` for example

either one works. pick your fighter. 🦋

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -q dir — use a spooling area that is not /var/spool/hylafax. sometimes you're just built different and your spool lives somewhere else, and that's valid.
• -h — specify exactly how the phone should be answered. lowkey the most interesting flag here, so listen up:

by default, the server process gets told to answer the phone and accept any kind of call — voice, data, fax, all of it, no discrimination. whether it can actually tell the difference between those call types depends on the modem's adaptive-answer support. so that part is on your hardware, not on us. 🙈

the -h option lets you force the server to answer for one particular type of call. your choices are:

• fax
• data
• voice
• any
• extern — forces faxgetty to invoke an external application to handle the call
• dialX — where X is a dialstring to dial before initiating a fax reception

⚠️ if you're going with dialX, heads up: the dialstring you specify will likely need to end with a semicolon (`;`). don't skip it, bestie. that semicolon is doing heavy lifting. 😭

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📁 FILES 📁

• /var/spool/hylafax — the default spooling area 🏠
• /var/spool/hylafax/FIFO — the fifo for contacting faxq

if you want the complete discussion of the structure and content of the spooling area — like, the whole deep dive, the full lore — go read hylafax-server(5). it's all there. fr fr. 📚

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• hylafax-server(5)
• faxgetty(8)

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this one comes to you from the System Manager's Manual, dated May 23, 1996 — yeah she's vintage, she's got history, she's still telling modems to answer the phone. periodt. 👑🌸