[Logcheck-devel] Bug#295560: logcheck: Please include filename when reporting "invalid regular expression"

[Frank Küster]

"Jamie L. Penman-Smithson" <jamie at silverdream.org> wrote:

> If you run logcheck in debug mode you'll be able to find out which file
> the error is in.
>
> For example, I added this to ignore.d.server/logcheck:
>
> ^\w{3} [ :0-9]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ foobar\[[0-9]+\]: test (foo test$
>
> Running logcheck -otd gives:
>
> [...]
> D: [1108580515] cleanchecked - dir
> - /tmp/logcheck.pFqP43/ignore/logcheck
> grep: Invalid regular expression
> [...]
>
> I think this is what you're looking for?

No, not really. I know I can find the problematic file this way. But I
would prefer to get an indication about this in the mail that cron
sends. If an inexperienced user gets a mail with a subject from some
crontab file and a body that only says "grep: invalid regular
expression", he will problably not know at once what this means (and I
must say that I was not sure that it was an error in one of my logcheck
filter files until I saw the debug output).

What I suggest is that for each egrep over the filter files, you check
whether the return value is 2, and if yes send a message to stderr:

"logcheck found an invalid regular expression in file $file" 

(ideally with the temporary directory mapped back to the original
location).

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer