Interworking of cron and sendmail applets

Harald Becker ralda at gmx.de
Wed Jan 22 22:29:14 UTC 2014


Hi Kaarle !

>I would like to understand why the sendmail applet requires the
>use of the -f option. It used to be optional, but it was made
>mandatory in commit 88b8f0a, which has an informative commit log
>message: "sendmail: update by Vladimir". I suggest the -f option
>be made optional again unless there are good reasons not to do
>so.

I do not know, why this option has made mandatory, but as far as
i know does BB sendmail always need some extra options to know
where to send the mail (mail relay), and will not work without
this information. So it is of no extra cost to add the sender
option at the same time. In addition most systems run some
services as root, but use complete different names for mails send
to other systems. So making the -f mandatory gives some novice
protection to avoid wrong mail addresses.

--
Harald


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