Re: [Fetchmail-users] Any way to remove timestamps from fetchmail output?

[Matthias A. <mat...@gm...>]

Am 14.04.25 um 10:36 schrieb Spencer Collyer:
> Hi,
>
> After a recent update of my Arch Linux system my fetchmail is now at release 6.5.2+TLS+NLS.
>
> Since updating to this release, I'm seeing timestamps appearing in the fetchmail output, where they didn't appear before.
>
> For instance, sample output used to be:
>
> -----------------------------------------------
> 2 messages for spencercollyer at mail.plus.net (89359 octets).
> reading message spe...@ma...:1 of 2 (47364 octets) flushed
> reading message spe...@ma...:2 of 2 (41995 octets) flushed
> -----------------------------------------------
>
> But now I'm getting:
> -----------------------------------------------
> Apr 04 09:00:00 fetchmail: 3 messages for spencercollyer at mail.plus.net (82284 octets).
> Apr 04 09:00:00 fetchmail: reading message spe...@ma...:1 of 3Apr 04 09:00:00 fetchmail:  (31026 octets) flushed
> Apr 04 09:00:00 fetchmail: reading message spe...@ma...:2 of 3Apr 04 09:00:00 fetchmail:  (31715 octets) flushed
> Apr 04 09:00:01 fetchmail: reading message spe...@ma...:3 of 3Apr 04 09:00:01 fetchmail:  (19543 octets) flushed
> -----------------------------------------------
>
> I'd like to go back to the old style format, as I don't really need the timestamp - I always call fetchmail in a cron job so don't need the timestamp as the mail from cron tells me when it iwas run.
>
> Failing that, is it possible to at least get rid of the second timestamp on each line? That is just noise which makes the message harder to read.
>
> I've looked over the help that's printed if you use `fetchmail -h` but don't see anything on there.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Spencer

Hello Spencer,

Thanks for the question and feedback. The log format is hardcoded, so
you have not missed anything like a switch, there is none.

I'll see if I can change something for 6.5.3 to fix the double timestamp
though, <https://gitlab.com/fetchmail/fetchmail/-/issues/66>.

In the interim, for cron, the first timestamp - can be stripped off by
piping the output through sed, say,

fetchmail --your-options-here 2>&1 | sed -Ee
's/^(Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Ju[nl]|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dev) [0-9]{1,2}
[0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2} //'

HTH

Matthias