Re: how to log date/time in daemon mode?

I ended up adding a few lines to the fetchmail source (see below). 
Someone a bit more enterprising than me could probably submit a patch with 
some kind of config file option (eg. log_timestamp) to do something 
similar.

This makes the log entries look like this:

   fetchmail [2018/09/29 17:04:41]: 2 messages for ...
   fetchmail [2018/09/29 17:04:42]: reading message ...

Here's the patch I used for 6.3.26...

diff -ur fetchmail-6.3.26/report.c fetchmail-6.3.26-new/report.c
--- fetchmail-6.3.26/report.c	2013-04-23 13:00:45.000000000 -0700
+++ fetchmail-6.3.26-new/report.c	2017-09-28 23:25:10.443642824 
-0700
@@ -125,13 +125,20 @@
      else /* i. e. not using syslog */
  #endif
      {
+	time_t      now;
+	static char timebuf[20];
+
  	if ( *message == '\n' )
  	{
  	    fputc( '\n', errfp );
  	    ++message;
  	}
  	if (!partial_suppress_tag)
-		fprintf (errfp, "%s: ", program_name);
+	{
+		time(&now);
+		strftime (timebuf, sizeof(timebuf), "%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S", localtime(&now));
+		fprintf (errfp, "%s [%s]: ", program_name, timebuf);
+	}
  	partial_suppress_tag = 0;

  #ifdef VA_START


On Sat, 29 Sep 2018, Gene Heskett wrote:

> On Saturday 29 September 2018 19:30:41 Peter Pentchev wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 02:17:55PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>>> On Saturday 29 September 2018 13:10:49 Juergen Edner wrote:
>>>> Hi Gene,
>>>>
>>>>> I was subjected to a phishing attack yesterday and again today,
>>>>> and it would have been a lot easier to correlate the messages if
>>>>> fetchmail was logging the time, preferably the date/time at the
>>>>> end of fetching of fetching each mail. Something it is not now,
>>>>> and never has done.  And I just reread the man pages without
>>>>> finding a clue.
>>>>>
>>>>> How do I enable this so a date/time exists in the fetchmail.log?
>>>>
>>>> I'm using the following two commands to log the start and end of
>>>> request cyle:
>>>>
>>>> preconnect  "echo 'fetchmail: awakened at '`date +'%a, %d %b %G
>>>> %H:%M:%S (%Z)'`"
>>>>
>>>> postconnect "echo 'fetchmail: sleeping at '`date +'%a, %d %b %G
>>>> %H:%M:%S (%Z)'` for xxx seconds
>>>
>>> THis would triple the size of the log in terms of line count. What I
>>> would really like to do is convert the single log line:
>>>
>>> fetchmail: reading message [email protected]@pop.shentel.net:1 of
>>> 1 (8044 octets) flushed
>>>
>>> to:
>>>
>>> fetchmail: reading message [email protected]@pop.shentel.net:1 of
>>> 1 (8044 octets) flushed 09/27/18 14;51.28
>>
>> This could be done if you pipe fetchmail's output through some other
>> program that puts a timestamp on each line; multilog, the log
>> processor from the daemontools package, comes to mind, but in a pinch
>> this might be done with a small dedicated program, maybe something
>> like this:
>>
>> #!/usr/bin/perl
>>
>> use 5.012;
>> use strict;
>> use warnings;
>>
>> use POSIX qw(strftime);
>>
>> while (<>) {
>> 	print strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', localtime)." $_";
>> }
>>
>> ...or even something like:
>>
>> #!/bin/sh
>>
>> while read line; do
>> 	printf '%s %s\n' "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')" "$line"
>> done
>>
> I see, this last looks to be more promising. Looks like the date/time
> would be prepended, the src of the line would be intercepted so the
> extra data can be prepended.
>
>> But, yes, I do see your point that fetchmail could also do it by
>> itself, although sometimes chaining a couple of tools is a good
>> approach.
>
> Been known to do that many times in the past, but time has taken its toll
> on my thinker.
>>
>> G'luck,
>> Peter
>
> Thank you Peter.
>
>