popen($problems);

Anon

hi folks,

I have been trying to figure out how to use popen() to read and extract a specific string (unique identifier) from mailing's that are returned to the server.

"mail -p -P" is the command that returns this from the shell, how do I use popen to
return similar results?- is this refering to a mail.txt -
Do I need to use chdir() to make the path root directory current befor I continue?
I have used fopen to and refered to mail.txt and it has returned a positive file handle but I am unable to read it?

Basically I want to capture the string value, insert it into MySQL and delete the remainder of the file. I been reading a lot on fopen, but I have not found anything that would illustrate how to do this with popen.
Can someone point me in the right direction.
Thanks much,
Chris

Anon

What platform is this on? Clearly not Redhat, mail has no such
options there. And do keep in mind that popen() gives you
a unidirectional pipe. If you need to write to the process's
stdin (i.e. to control it) and also read back from its stdout,
you're out of luck--this requires you to be able to control
what goes on during fork()/exec(), and so far PHP doesn't
give the programmer access to that.

Anon

it's SunOs 5.7 .
-Chris

Anon

So do my other suggestions make any sense?

What exactly does "mail -p -P" do?

Anon

% mail -p -P

basically all this does is allow me to read mail sent to the server, is this data typically saved to a textfile? If so I could use fopen to read/delete it?

thanks again,
chris

Anon

Well, sure, but I more specifically was wondering what the '-p -P'
meant. You might be able to open the actual mail file with fopen(),
but then you'd have to know where it was stored.