<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hari Sekhon wrote: <blockquote cite="mid44E03F59.2070607@googlemail.com" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Thomas Sluyter wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">After following your suggestion regarding prinf and checking the previously unchanged misccommand.cfg I'm not entirely sure what is going on here. The definition for email is below: ... This doesn't look bad to me, it seems to simply be using lots of Macro$ so I assume that the macro must be sending it something funny.... Will have to scratch my head and try to track that down. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">You -did- notice that to printf "\b" is a backspace, right? Which would totally explain what you're seeing... </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">err, I think that is the notation for a backslash escaped sequence, not a backspace character, which is \b. It turns out that the points at which I am getting those strange squares is actually replacing "\\" and "\" in \\hostname\sharename. So I know where the problem is and what part needs fixing, but I have tried to recreate it on the command line but the message never comes through to me to fully diagnose. eg.. echo '\\hostname\sharename' | mail -s "test" <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:me@mydomain.com">me@mydomain.com</a> but I haven't gotten this. Strange, that now I'm not getting messages from /bin/mail. Will have to look into this and get back to you. Hari ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642">http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642</a> _______________________________________________ Nagios-users mailing list <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net">Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users">https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users</a> ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null </pre> </blockquote> ok, after looking at my mail server the problem was the oh so brilliant thunderbird client. sorted. now back to the original problem... I've fixed the character issue in the notifications with \\hostname\sharename. The problem lies with the %b in the printf statement. I changed this to %q. Remember that the system's printf is superseded by the shell built-in. Any way, the %q defines that the argument list is appropriately formatted for shell reuse which is exactly the was that it is being used in the mail pipe for this notification functionality. Thanks for the help, you've given me the jolt I needed. Hari </body> </html>