Re: [Fetchmail-users] how to log date/time in daemon mode?

[Peter P. <ro...@ri...>]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 02:17:55PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Saturday 29 September 2018 13:10:49 Juergen Edner wrote:
> 
> > Hi Gene,
> >
> > > I was subjected to a phishing attack yesterday and again today, and
> > > it would have been a lot easier to correlate the messages if
> > > fetchmail was logging the time, preferably the date/time at the end
> > > of fetching of fetching each mail. Something it is not now, and
> > > never has done.  And I just reread the man pages without finding a
> > > clue.
> > >
> > > How do I enable this so a date/time exists in the fetchmail.log?
> >
> > I'm using the following two commands to log the start and end of
> > request cyle:
> >
> > preconnect  "echo 'fetchmail: awakened at '`date +'%a, %d %b %G
> > %H:%M:%S (%Z)'`"
> >
> > postconnect "echo 'fetchmail: sleeping at '`date +'%a, %d %b %G
> > %H:%M:%S (%Z)'` for xxx seconds
> >
> THis would triple the size of the log in terms of line count. What I 
> would really like to do is convert the single log line:
> 
> fetchmail: reading message ghe...@sh...@pop.shentel.net:1 of 1 
> (8044 octets) flushed
> 
> to:
> 
> fetchmail: reading message ghe...@sh...@pop.shentel.net:1 of 1 
> (8044 octets) flushed 09/27/18 14;51.28

This could be done if you pipe fetchmail's output through some other
program that puts a timestamp on each line; multilog, the log processor
from the daemontools package, comes to mind, but in a pinch this might
be done with a small dedicated program, maybe something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.012;
use strict;
use warnings;

use POSIX qw(strftime);

while (<>) {
	print strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', localtime)." $_";
}

...or even something like:

#!/bin/sh

while read line; do
	printf '%s %s\n' "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')" "$line"
done

But, yes, I do see your point that fetchmail could also do it by itself,
although sometimes chaining a couple of tools is a good approach.

G'luck,
Peter

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