Patch for Plugin "No Output"

[Andreas Ericsson]

Ethan Galstad wrote:
> As I'm catching up on old patches, I thought I'd bring this old thread 
> up one more time to try and get a feel for people's thoughts.
> 
> Personally, I would prefer not to skip empty lines of plugin output in 
> an effort to find the first line of text - that should be fixed in plugins.
> 

True, but it will save some on support effort on nagios-help and 
nagios-users where newbies generally ask why their plugins' output 
doesn't show up in the gui while it does when they run it from the 
command-line. A cut 'n paste of the run generally excludes any empty 
lines so it takes several mailings to get it right.

> However, grabbing output from stderr might be of interest to people for 
> debugging purposes as Bob mentioned.  Is there sufficient interest to 
> justify a patch of some kind?  If so, how would the output from stderr 
> be treated?  Would it go into a macro other than $HOST/SERVICEOUTPUT$, 
> or would it be best to tag it onto the end?
> 

stderr output is probably mostly useful in the gui only. I wouldn't want 
to get notified about UNKNOWN states that only has debug output in them 
(unless the stderr output is the *only* output). When I'm trying new 
plugins and stuff I'm constantly monitoring the GUI anyways, and I guess 
that's how the majority of home-cookers do it once past the alpha stage 
of command-line runs.

The "(no output returned from plugin)" shouldn't appear if there is 
output on stderr.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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