NOTIFY(8C)

💖 NOTIFY 💖 — the notify page from section 8C, bestie

okay so like, welcome to the notify manual, section 8C, and lemme tell you this one is so important if you're running HylaFAX. it's giving "your fax job has tea to spill and it's gonna email you about it." let's go ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

notify — the HylaFAX user notification program. that's it, that's the vibe 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

/var/spool/hylafax/bin/notify qfile why jobtime [ nextTry ]

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

bin/notify is the program that the facsimile server calls up when it needs to tell a user what's going on with an outbound job. and the whole point is that it's designed to be customizable by the administrator — like, it's meant to be messed with, no cap. (the ideal way to do this? make your own customized notify program under a different filename, or copy the default program to a different filename, customize that new file, and then point faxq(8C) at your customized program using NotifyCmd in the scheduler config file. see hylafax-config(5F) for the deets 🎀)

the default notification program just sends the user electronic mail describing the event or action. iconic. and the arguments are:

• qfile — the pathname of the job description file. literally just where the job lives 📁
• why — a string that says why the user is being notified. it's one of these bad boys:
  • done — job was completed successfully ✅
  • failed — ¹ job was not completed 😭
  • rejected — job was rejected for specified reasons 🙅
  • blocked — job is blocked by concurrent jobs 🚧
  • requeued — ¹ job was not completed, but was requeued for retry 🔁
  • removed — job was deleted from the queue 🗑️
  • killed — job was deleted from the queue 💀
  • timedout — job could not be sent before kill time expired ⏰
  • format_failed — document conversion failed 😵
  • no_formatter — the document conversion program was not found 🔍
  • poll_rejected — ¹ a polling request was rejected by the remote side 📡
  • poll_no_document — ¹ a polling request failed because nothing was available 🫥
  • poll_failed — ¹ a polling request failed for an unknown reason ❓
  • ¹ A transcript of the failed communication is returned to the sender. 📨
• jobtime — the total transmission time of a successful job, or the connect time of a failed request (passed as a string) ⏱️
• nextTry — the time (passed as a string) at which the next attempt will be made to complete the job. this parameter is passed only if why is requeued. so like, don't expect it otherwise bestie 🙈

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🎀 NOTES 🎀

the behavior of notify is intended to be customizable via the etc/FaxNotify program, if present. FaxNotify gets sourced after the q-file is parsed and all the default values are preset. here are the useful settings you can put in FaxNotify:

• WHY — is identical to why mentioned above, and it's lowkey so useful for figuring out under what conditions various settings should take effect. for example:

if [ "$WHY" != "done" ]; then
    RETURNFILETYPE=pdf;
fi

this would only set RETURNFILETYPE when the job did not complete successfully. slay ✨

• RETURNFILETYPE — can be set to tif, pdf, ps, or original. if you set it, it makes notify return a copy of the submitted documents to the SENDER address along with the notification message. the original setting uses the format type that was used in the submission. and yes you can specify multiple values by separating them with whitespace — in that case a separate attachment is created for each filetype. multitasking queen 💅
• RETURNTECHINFO — defaults to yes and it says whether or not technical info (like the session parameters) should be included with the notification message. if you set it to anything other than yes, that info will not be included. 🧚
• RETURNTRANSCRIPT — defaults to yes and it says whether or not the session transcript (log) should be returned with the notification message on the error conditions noted above. 📜
• NOTIFY_FAXMASTER — is used to deliver a notification message to TOADDR (which defaults to FaxMaster) that contains technical information about the job. this is so so useful for letting the administrator be aware of any problems before those problems get reported by the users — main character admin energy fr fr 👑. possible settings are yes, always, no, never, and errors. if errors is used, then the notification message is only sent to FaxMaster when the job experienced an error. the default is no. 🌈
• NOTIFICATIONLANGUAGE — the language of the e-mail messages sent by HylaFAX is selected according to the setting of the NOTIFICATIONLANGUAGE variable, which can be assigned a locale name like the LC_* and LANG locale environment variables.

if the NOTIFICATIONLANGUAGE variable is not set or is set to the empty value, then, as a default, the value of the LC_MESSAGES category locale name is used — that is, the value of the LC_ALL variable (if not empty), else of the LC_MESSAGES variable (if not empty), else of the LANG variable. 🦋

a suggestion for NOTIFICATIONLANGUAGE may be:

NOTIFICATIONLANGUAGE="${LC_ALL:-${LC_MESSAGES:-${LC_CTYPE:-${LANG:-}}}}"

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🍓 FILES 🍓

• /var/spool/hylafax — spooling area 📂
• /usr/bin/sendmail — for delivering mail 📮

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

faxq(8C), hylafax-server(5F), sendq(5F) — go read these next bestie, iykyk 🫶

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and that's the whole page!! this one's from May 8, 1996, and it's the NOTIFY(8C) page — yeah it's giving vintage but it still ate, periodt 💖✨