Bryan Henderson wrote:

I'm thinking about adding a destination type "program1" that is like "program" except it runs a separate process for each message and passes the message as an argument instead of Standard Input.

Does this sound like a good idea? Nope, not in this stage (=idea). It will be extremely easy to DoS the server if you have, say 10 MSGs of your kind in a second (or 100, or 1000). AFIAK, fork is one of the most expensive operations, so spawning a new process per MSG is probably a big overhead for nothing.

I'm expecting to use it run a program that emails the message to me, and use it for "alert" level messages. Find a daemon that does just that. Or write your own that has two threads/processes:

1. Read from STDIN (piped from syslog-ng) and buffer the input to $VAR. 2. if ($VAR != ''){mail($VAR); sleep $some_time;} Not sure if 1 is needed and you can rely on OS for buffering of pipeed data. Just my 2 yen. Kalin. -- | A | | D | | J | | P |