failed cron jobs send "attachment.pcx"?

English Programming/Scripting
#1

Dear fellows,

running openSuSE 11.1, we’re getting strange error mails from cron. The automatic update cron job sends an empty mail with a strange attachment called “attachment.pcx”. As it turns out, this isn’t an image, but rather the output of the YOU/zypper command:

running weekly cronjob scripts

SCRIPT: opensuse.org-online_update exited with RETURNCODE = 103.
SCRIPT: output (stdout && stderr) follows


The following packages are going to be upgraded:
  libqdialogsolver1   libzypp   python-satsolver   satsolver-tools   yast2-pkg-bindings   yast2-qt-pkg   zypper 

The following NEW patch is going to be installed:
  softwaremgmt 
e[2K
Continue? [YES/no]: yes
Warning: One of installed patches affects the package manager itself. Run this command once more to install any other needed patches.
SCRIPT: opensuse.org-online_update
------- END OF OUTPUT

The only idea I have is that the strange character before 2K is causing postfix to quarantine the text into an attachment, wildly guessing it as being a PCX image…

Other ideas or solutions on how to avoid this…?

#2

IMHO it asks for an answer Yes/No. So it thinks this is an interactiv session allthough it is run in the batch.
It seems that it tells you that the updater itself is involved in the update. Thus it will run this first and it tries to tell you that is has to run a second time to do the normal updates after that.

You better run this at least once interactive (e.g. by using YaST), to get past this answer.

#3

Alternatively edit the auto updater policy in YaST to not skip interactive jobs.

#4

Thanks for the tips!
Interactively running zypper will clear this, of course (the latter idea is too dangerous for us as also kernel updates would then be done silently).

The question remaining is if it is correct behaviour for postfix to treat a file with just one non-printable character as a PCX attachment, rather than sending it as-is…
But this may better be posted in the Applications forum, I guess.

Thanks and “closed”.