FAXSEND(8)

💖 FAXSEND(8) — the faxsend girlies' guide 💖

System Manager's Manual ✨ FAXSEND ✨

okay bestie, sit down, we're talking about faxsend, the HylaFAX facsimile transmit program. she's the one doing the actual faxing. 💅

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🌸 NAME 🌸

faxsend — HylaFAX facsimile transmit program 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

/usr/sbin/faxsend [ -l ] [ -p ] [ -c config ] -m device-ID qfile [qfile
[qfile [...]]]

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💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

so faxsend is literally the program that implements the facsimile transmission protocol for the HylaFAX system. she's the main character of actually sending the fax. 🎀

she gets invoked by the faxq scheduler process, once for every single facsimile transmit attempt. and she comes in with assumptions, okay, so let's vibe check them:

• her current working directory is the top of the spooling hierarchy 📂
• a suitable modem device has already been allocated for her use 📟
• all the documents to be sent are already converted to TIFF/F (TIFF Class F), at the appropriate resolution and with an appropriate data encoding ✨

and in normal use faxsend will inherit a lockfile for the modem from the faxq process. no cap. 🔒

the format of the job description file you pass on the command line is described over in sendq(5) — go read her, iykyk. 📖

then faxsend initializes the modem before attempting to transmit the facsimile, using the info in the appropriate modem configuration file. and here's the thing — if the modem does not respond to this initialization, faxsend will repeatedly try to initialize the modem. this behaviour is required for send-only environments where a faxgetty(8) process is not run (and the modem would be known to be in a properly initialized state). she's persistent, she's not giving up, periodt. 💪

faxsend catches SIGINT and SIGTERM and cleans up any resources she controls — and this is literally the mechanism faxq uses to abort a job while it's in progress. so if a job gets cancelled, that's her tidying up on her way out. 🧹

batching 👑 — multiple fax jobs of documents with varying formatting may be sent in one fax call by "batching" them, which you do by supplying faxsend with multiple qfile entries. multiple files, one call, efficient queen. 🔥

and many aspects of faxsend operation are controlled through a configuration file 📝 — it lives in the spooler hierarchy in the etc subdirectory and is named config.device-ID. for detailed info on what goes in there, consult hylafax-config(5). she's got lore. ✨

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

the following options are recognized:

• -c config — treat config as a configuration parameter specification that gets interpreted after reading the per-device configuration file. for example, -c sessiontracing:0x4f would set the SessionTracing configuration parameter to 0x4f, overriding any setting in the configuration file. overrides? she said yes. 💅
• -m devID — the device to use in processing the job. ⚠️ note that this is a device identifier and not the pathname of the tty special file. a device identifier is formed from a device filename by removing any leading /dev/ and converting any / characters to _ characters. so yes bestie, that transformation is real and you have to do it. 🙈
• -l — do the UUCP lockfile protocol in faxsend itself. by default faxsend assumes she's invoked with the device already locked and that she does not need to manage the lockfile. so -l is her taking the lockfile duties onto herself. 🔐
• -p — do not change the process priority when transmitting. normally faxsend will raise her priority to reduce i/o latency — so this option is useful for debugging. 🐛

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🦋 NOTES 🦋

faxsend returns the new job status to faxq through the returned value in the associated qfile. the possible values, bestie:

• send_retry — retry job 🔁
• send_failed — job finished without success 💀
• send_done — job completed successfully ✅
• send_reformat — job should be retried after documents are reformatted 🎀

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🌈 FILES 🌈

• /var/spool/hylafax/etc/config.devID — device-specific configuration file 📂

consult hylafax-server(5) for a complete discussion of the structure and content of the spooling area. she has the whole map of the spooling area, fr fr. 🗺️

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

faxq(8), hylafax-server(5), hylafax-config(5)

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🫶 this one is from the System Manager's Manual, dated October 3, 1995 — yeah she's an icon from '95 and she still faxes better than everyone. 💖✨ mwah, go send a fax. 💅