Sendopr will send a short one line message to the operator, if the message is part of the command-line. Otherwise, standard input is used. Input will terminate when EOF is received. Sendopr has two modes, immediate and queued that are set with the -i and -q flags.
Jobs that aren't attached to a terminal (ie. they have no user at a controlling tty device), for example cron(1) jobs, will use the queued mode as the default. User jobs work in an immediate mode by default. In either case flags can be used to select a mode different from the default.
With the -i switch specified, sendopr is in immediate mode and the message is sent immediately to the operator's X-terminal. After the operator reads the message, they will acknowledge its receipt by clicking on a button in the message window. The button will cause sendopr to echo back a short note to the user that the message has been read.
In queued mode, sendopr will send the message via a queueing strategy and the operators will read the message only when they check the queue. A verification message will not be relayed back to the sender in this case. In this mode the message is sent via a host on the network.
If the display is specified with the -d option, the message will go to the specified Xstation instead of the default display. The default is operator:0; however, that can be overridden by the file /usr/local/share/etc/operator.
Sendopr honours the following environment variables. The default values can be changed to suit the operator's needs, otherwise they will be set to the default values.
There aren't any. Sorry, but you're on your own.
Since sendopr uses xmessage, the same restrictions and bugs for xmessage apply to sendopr. Some punctuation marks, such as "!" and "?" cannot be used in the message because of their shell interpretation. (Command recall and wildcard)
It's desired if sendopr could beep the terminal at the start of the message to get the operator's attention and cause an interfaced lamp to flash, but xmessage seems to filter out any ^G's sent to it.
The operator's Xresources should be configured to allow messages to be
received,
ie. xhost +
should be set, and in the operator's
.xdefaults
file, there should be a line similar to:
Important.Geometry: 800x500+700+200
to indicate the size and location of the message window on the Xterminal.
Sendopr assumes the operator's terminal is X-based.
Sendopr does not wrap long lines around to the next line if the message is on the command-line. If a sentence is longer than the window size, the end of the line is cut off. This restriction is not imposed when standard input is used.