Re: strange error in my procmailrc

"@lbutlr" <[email protected]> writes:
> when the procmailrc hands off mail for my personal account it logs an error:
>
> User [email protected] has a .procmailrc, processing...
> date: illegal time format
> usage: date [-jnu] [-d dst] [-r seconds] [-t west] [-v[+|-]val[ymwdHMS]] ... 
>             [-f fmt date | [[[[[cc]yy]mm]dd]HH]MM[.ss]] [+format]
>
> None of the other accounts with .procmailrcs log this error, but when I look in my .procmailrc for date:
>
> $ grep date /home/me/.procmailrc 
> DATE=`date '+%d-%b-%Y'`
> MDATE=`date '+%Y-%m'`
> YDATE=`date '%Y'`
> LONGDATE=`date "+%y-%b-%d %I:%M:%S %z"`
> LOG="`date`${NL}Checking Spam Status... "
>   LOG="done. `date`$NL"
>   LOG="Delivered `date`$NL"
> LOG="Delivered `date`$NL"
>
> None of these seem like they should be throwing any sort of
> error. They all execute fine from the command line and date is in
> /bin/ so I don't think it could be a path problem. Also, there are not
> errors logged to my procmailk log file, only to the global log file/

It's a rather strange problem.  Of course, if you compare YDATE=`date
'%Y'` with the usage message that you see, you can tell that it has an
invalid argument.  But that's rather hard to spot if you don't know
where to look.

What I find odd is that if I execute that on my command line, date says
"date: invalid date '%Y'".  So I wonder if YDATE=`date '%Y'` really does
not report an error message when you execute it on your command line,
and if not, why.

Dale