[Logcheck-devel] Bug#302689: treats non-zero egrep exit status as failure

[Marcin Owsiany]

Package: logcheck
Version: 1.2.36
Severity: important
Tags: patch

"debdiff logcheck_1.2.35.dsc logcheck_1.2.36.dsc" shows this among other
changes:

-           egrep --text -v -f $clean/$file $TMPDIR/checked | cat \
-               >> $TMPDIR/checked.1 \
-                   || error "Could not output to TMPDIR/checked.1 Disk Full?"
+           (egrep --text -v -f $clean/$file $TMPDIR/checked \
+               || warn  "Could not process file $file") | cat \
+               >> $TMPDIR/checked.1 \
+               || error "Could not output to $TMPDIR/checked.1 Disk Full?"

However this causes spurious reports looking like this:

| System Events
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=
| 
| 
| Logcheck Warnings
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
| Could not process file spamassassin
| 

This is because egrep returns 1 if no lines are found:

| DIAGNOSTICS
|        Normally, exit status is 0 if selected lines are found and 1 otherwise.
|        But the exit status is 2 if an error occurred, unless the -q or --quiet
|        or --silent option is used and a selected line is found.

The quick fix is to simply revert that change. A better one would be to write a
more elaborate condition on whether egrep returned exit code 2.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-2-k7
Locale: LANG=pl_PL, LC_CTYPE=pl_PL (charmap=ISO-8859-2)

Versions of packages logcheck depends on:
ii  adduser          3.63                    Add and remove users and groups
ii  cron             3.0pl1-87               management of regular background p
ii  debconf [debconf 1.4.47                  Debian configuration management sy
ii  debianutils      2.13.2                  Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  exim4            4.50-4                  metapackage to ease exim MTA (v4) 
ii  exim4-daemon-hea 4.50-4                  exim MTA (v4) daemon with extended
ii  lockfile-progs   0.1.10                  Programs for locking and unlocking
ii  logcheck-databas 1.2.36                  A database of system log rules for
ii  logtail          1.2.36                  Print log file lines that have not
ii  mailx            1:8.1.2-0.20040524cvs-4 A simple mail user agent
ii  sysklogd [system 1.4.1-16                System Logging Daemon

-- debconf information:
  logcheck/changes:
* logcheck/install-note: