[Mailman-Users] More on ampersand in listname

[Larry Stone]

On 3/6/05 7:01 AM, John Fleming at john at wa9als.com wrote:

> Well, it let me create the list and I could use bin/withlist commands on it
> by enclosing listname in single quotes.  Everything looked fine, but when I
> tried my first post to the list, I got this back:
> 
> The Postfix program
> 
> <S&L@<domain>.org>: Command died with status 127:
>     "/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post s&l". Command output: sh: line 1: l:
>     command not found post script, list not found: s
> 
> So is ampersand in listname just not allowed?  - John

I'd stay away from an ampersand. It has a special meaning in Unix commands
(means execute the previous command in the background) and unless properly
escaped, will be taken for that special meaning every time it occurs in a
shell command.

The command in that error message (/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post s&l)
is a shell command and as I would expect, it was truncated at the ampersand
and presumably executed in the background.

-- Larry Stone
   larry at stonejongleux.com
   http://www.stonejongleux.com/