NAME

clerk - a sophisticated helper for moderating a mailing list by an editorial collective

SYNPOSIS

clerk cmd option... config

DESCRIPTION

This program helps maintaining a mailing list. It expects a mail on STDIN and derives further steps from the contents of this input, and from the options given.

It can (and should) be used as a replacement for majordomos resend.

Please refer to the index manpage for a complete description of this software.

OPTIONS

There are two types of options: command options (cmd) and normal options (option).

COMMAND OPTIONS

These options control which operation is performed by the clerk. At most one of them is allowed.

-c: This command means, that the post given on standard input is a command post. This is synonymous to the command -l with the first command list.
-l list: This command is used when a post is given on standard input. It gives the mailing list on behalf of which this is run, and this can be included in the sendmail alias calling clerk.; If no command option is given at all, this one is the default. In this case the value of list is set to the basename of config.
-m: This command means, that the post given on standard input is a post requesting an entry from the menu. This is synonymous to the command -l with the first menu list.
-r report: Instead of normal operation create and send a configured report named report.

NORMAL OPTIONS

These options control things, which are needed regardless of the mode of operation.

-d dir: This option sets the data directory used. It overrides the configuration variable set by baseDir.; If this option is given, the configuration given by config is dumped to a file in this directory if necessary or read from this file if present. This speeds up startup largely.
-v: Verbose output.
-x destination: Switches on a cold run where actually nothing will be sent to anybody. Instead the mail that would have been sent is output to the perl file description destination. Thus >&STDOUT or |sendmail debugger would be interesting values. The file is closed after writing to it, so do not use just >STDOUT.

ARGUMENTS

config: Gives a file which is used as the configuration file. If this is a relative path, -d dir must be given, too, and dir is prefixed before config.