Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!kyle
From: kyle@uunet.UU.NET (Kyle Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: send-mail (what does it do?)
Summary: Berkeley Mail is the culprit not sendmail
Message-ID: <124849@uunet.UU.NET>
Date: 7 Mar 91 06:43:51 GMT
References: <1991Mar06.213014.25601@lynx.CS.ORST.EDU>
Organization: UUNET Communications Services, Falls Church, VA
Lines: 18

gatesl@prism.CS.ORST.EDU (Lee Gates) writes:
 > While monitoring my processes one day, I noticed that ps reported that I was
 > running a process called send-mail.  I am familiar with sendmail and unix,
 > so I sought after the man pages... even grepped all the man pages for the
 > string send-mail.  I would like to know what part of sendmail
 > send-mail does.

Berkeley Mail makes argv[0] "send-mail" when it execs sendmail.

 > The reason I am interested is because I hadn't send any mail for over an
 > hour, and didn't have any mail in the mailq at the time.  Initially, I was
 > suspecting some sort of security breach, with a setuid command, but I
 > haven't found the same process happenning.

sendmail was probably waiting for some mailer that it exec'd to
exit.  I don't know why it would be waiting so long on your
system, but it's not inconceivable for a mailer to take hours to
deliver a message.