faxq-helper(8)

NAME

faxq-helper - privileged helper process to access the fax queue

faxq-helper <command> [<options>]

faxq-helper is part of the internal workings of faxspool(1).

Formerly, the /var/spool/fax/outgoing directory was world-writeable, leading to all sort of funny symlink attacks against faxspool(1) and faxrunq(8).

These days, it's owned by the user ``uucp'', and only this user can write to it. To be able to put jobs there, faxspool(1) calls faxqhelper for very clearly defined purposes:: - make a new queue directory; - put a new fax G3 file into this queue directory; - put a JOB file into this queue directory, and activate the fax job
and possibly:: - remove a fax job from the queue (to be used by faxrm and in case of
errors): - re-queue a job that has been suspended due to repeated failures
(faxq -r)
To achieve this, faxq-helper is installed set-user-id uucp. If you remove the suid bit, or chown the fax queue directory to a different user, it will stop working.

faxq-helper has the following exit() values:

0 everything went fine

1 invalid JOB ID specified on the command line

2 some problem with the directory setup of the outgoing queue dir,: /var/spool/fax/outgoing (it will print a detailed error message)
3 some problems with the user ID setup of the ``uucp'' user (it: will print a detailed error message)
10 failure to process the specified command (it will print a: detailed error message)