exiwhat - Finding out what Exim processes are doing

exiwhat

On operating systems that can restart a system call after receiving a signal (most modern OS), an Exim process responds to the SIGUSR1 signal by writing a line describing what it is doing to the file exim-process.info in the Exim spool directory. The exiwhat script sends the signal to all Exim processes it can find, having first emptied the file. It then waits for one second to allow the Exim processes to react before displaying the results. In order to run exiwhat successfully you have to have sufficient privilege to send the signal to the Exim processes, so it is normally run as root.

Unfortunately, the ps command which exiwhat uses to find Exim processes varies in different operating systems. Not only are different options used, but the format of the output is different. For this reason, there are some system configuration options that configure exactly how exiwhat works. If it doesn't seem to be working for you, check the following compile-time options:

EXIWHAT_PS_CMD

the command for running ps

EXIWHAT_PS_ARG

the argument for ps

EXIWHAT_EGREP_ARG

the argument for egrep to select from ps output

EXIWHAT_KILL_ARG

the argument for the kill command

An example of typical output from exiwhat is

  164 daemon: -q1h, listening on port 25
10483 running queue: waiting for 0tAycK-0002ij-00 (10492)
10492 delivering 0tAycK-0002ij-00 to mail.ref.example [10.19.42.42]
  (editor@ref.example)
10592 handling incoming call from [192.168.243.242]
10628 accepting a local non-SMTP message

The first number in the output line is the process number. The third line has been split here, in order to fit it on the page.

exim(8), /usr/share/doc/exim4-base/

This manual page was stitched together from spec.txt by Andreas Metzler <ametzler at downhill.at.eu.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).