PMDF System Manager's Guide

It is sometimes useful to be able to start message delivery operations manually. For example, suppose that your Internet connection was down and while it was down a lot of messages built up in the outbound TCP/IP queues. The network is now up and you want to begin delivery now rather than wait for the periodic delivery job. The obvious thing to do next is to start a delivery job to deliver all the pending messages. One way to do this is to simply run master.com interactively from a suitably privileged account on an OpenVMS system, or to run the pmdf run utility from the root account on a UNIX system or from the Administrator account on an NT system; i.e., on OpenVMS,

$ @PMDF_COM:master channel [polling-flag [since-time]]

or on UNIX,

# pmdf run channel [polling-flag]

or on NT,

C:\> pmdf run channel [polling-flag]

Here channel is the channel to process and polling-flag is poll if the connection is to be established regardless of whether or not messages are queued for delivery. If polling-flag is nopoll, the default, a connection is made only if messages are queued for delivery. since-time is an optional date and time specification. Queue entries created before since-time will not be processed. Omitting since-time causes all queue entries to be processed.

The problem with this technique is that it ties up your terminal for the duration of the transaction. The alternative is to use the submit_master.com procedure on OpenVMS or the pmdf submit_master utility (or the synonymous pmdf submit utility) on UNIX or NT to submit a processing job that does the same thing. On OpenVMS, use a command of the form, (where queue-name will default to MAIL$BATCH if it is not specified):

$ @PMDF_COM:submit_master channel [polling-flag [queue-name [since-time]]]

or on UNIX, a command of the form:

# pmdf submit_master channel [polling-flag]

or on NT, a command of the form:

C:\> pmdf submit_master channel [polling-flag]

All the defaults are the same as when master.com (on OpenVMS) or pmdf run (on UNIX or NT) is invoked directly.