#254 non-interactive use of newlist
(This is Debian bug #36063)
The comment at the top of /usr/sbin/newlist says:
Create a new, unpopulated mailing list.
newlist <list-name> <list-admin's-address> <admin-password> <immediate>
You can specify as many of the arguments as you want on the command line. The optional <immediate> argument, if present, means to send out the notice immediately. Otherwise, the script hangs pending input, to give time for the person creating the list to customize it before sending the admin an email notice about the existence of the new list.
It is useful that there is a way to use this noninteractively. Unfortunately this is made more difficult because the password has to be passed in as a command line argument where `ps' can see it.
Furthermore, since the script (correctly) uses a real
password-gathering function when a password isn't supplied, it is not easy to have a script feed it a password on stdin (the script will require a tty, etc.)
It would be good if there were a way to pass the password in via stdin or some such, eg by passing a special option, or a special format of `password', or an environment variable giving the fd to use.
Perhaps this should be in the python module getpass, or perhaps it should be in mailman.