Monday, June 21, 2010

debugging my .procmailrc

It's usually not really big fun, if you find a message like this in your procmail log file: "procmail: Missing action".

Well, I don't yet know of a procmail syntax checker, which is rather a pity, so the debugging is of a dynamic kind.

Just add "VERBOSE=on" in the beginning of your .procmailrc, enjoy the flood of "procmail: No match on ...,", and find your "procmail: Missing action" occasionally in the middle of it. You found the corrupted rule then. The rule in question might actually be a very rarely used one resp. one pretty at the end of your .procmailrc, so it may take a while resp. a couple of incoming mails, until it gets used and shows up.
Once you found and corrected the offender, I am quite sure, you will remove "VERBOSE=on" very quickly.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Jochen! A Google search for 'procmail missing action' brought me here, and your advice worked spectacularly. I don't know why Procmail doesn't just show the filename and line number when it's parsing.