faxq-helper(1)

💖 faxq-helper(1) — the mgetty+sendfax manual, bestie edition 💖

okay so before we even start, yes this is a page from the mgetty+sendfax manual, and yes it's giving ✨*infrastructure*✨ energy. stay with me.

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🌸 NAME 🌸

faxq-helper — a privileged little helper process whose whole job is getting into the fax queue for you 💅

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

faxq-helper <command> [<options>]

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so faxq-helper is, like, part of the internal workings of faxspool(1). not the main character, more like the main character's very trusted assistant. 🫶

back in the day (the dark ages, honestly 💀) the /var/spool/fax/outgoing directory was world-writeable, and bestie... that led to all sort of funny symlink attacks against faxspool(1) and faxrunq(8). not the cute kind of funny. the security incident kind of funny. 😭

these days, it's owned by the user uucp, and only this user can write to it. no cap. 🔒

so to be able to put jobs in there, faxspool(1) calls faxq-helper for very clearly defined purposes:

• make a new queue directory 📁
• put a new fax G3 file into this queue directory 📠
• put a JOB file into this queue directory, and activate the fax job ⚡

and possibly:

• remove a fax job from the queue (to be used by faxrm and in case of errors) 🗑️
• re-queue a job that has been suspended due to repeated failures (faxq -r) 🔁

and how does it pull this off, you ask? to achieve this, faxq-helper is installed set-user-id uucp. iconic. 👑

⚠️ but listen — if you remove the suid bit, or chown the fax queue directory to a different user, it will stop working. fr fr. no notes, that's just how it is.

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🎀 RETURN VALUES 🎀

faxq-helper has the following exit() values, and honestly they're all pretty self-explanatory but let's go through them together:

• 0 — everything went fine 🥳 slay.
• 1 — invalid JOB ID specified on the command line 🙈
• 2 — some problem with the directory setup of the outgoing queue dir, /var/spool/fax/outgoing (it will print a detailed error message) 😬
• 3 — some problems with the user ID setup of the uucp user (it will print a detailed error message) 💀
• 10 — failure to process the specified command (it will print a detailed error message) 😭

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• faxspool(1)
• faxq(1)
• faxrm(1)
• faxqueue(5)

go read those too, they're the whole friend group 🫂

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

faxq-helper is Copyright (C) 2004-2006 by Gert Doering, <gert@greenie.muc.de>.

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and that's the whole thing bestie 🎀 this page came from greenie, dated 18 Feb 06, and it's the faxq-helper(1) page from the mgetty+sendfax manual. go forth and queue responsibly 💖✨