Email outcome of launchd jobs?

Question

I used to have a number of cron jobs set up in /var/cron/tabs/root. Since I have postfix turned on in my Mac, I would get emails sent to the local root email account detailing the outcome of these cron events.
So, after "enhancing" my Mac's unix underpinnings to the point of inoperability, I found that an "archive and (re)install the OS" was in order. While I was at it, I decided to go ahead and convert all these cron jobs to launchd events (plist files in /Library/LaunchDaemons) since I was doing massive cleanup/recovery activities anyways.
Now, as an example, one of my old cron jobs ran diskutil as root and verified the boot disk on a weekly basis. I "borrowed" one of Apple's OEM plist files and edited it. The replacement launchd plist file in /Library/LaunchDaemons looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>verifyBootDisk</string>
<key>ServiceDescription</key>
<string>verify boot disk as part of a weekly disk maintenance routine</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/sbin/diskutil</string>
<string>verifyVolume</string>
<string>/</string>
</array>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
<key>Hour</key>
<integer>15</integer>
<key>Minute</key>
<integer>54</integer>
<key>Weekday</key>
<integer>5</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>
It appears to run okay, as do my other launchd jobs, because I can have Activity Monitor running and two processes, fsck_hfs and DiskManager, launch promptly at 3:54PM on Friday, so I believe that the launchd plist is doing exactly what I want it to do. But, unlike the old days when I was handling it as a cron job, I am no longer getting summary outcome emails sent to the local root email account.
On the other hand, the /etc/periodic/* launchd jobs (where * is daily, weekly, or monthly) are generating these summary outcome emails and sending them to the local root email account.
So, I'm wondering, does anyone know how to make launchd jobs, that are not being launched from within the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-*ly.plist environments, generate and send a summary outcome email to the local root email account?

Answer 1

My own personal mailserver here is working just fine with authorized users sending and receiving mail to/from internal and external addresses (and I believe that it does NOT work for UNauthorized users, too .
Currently, the periodic jobs are sending my root account summaries of results of the daily/weekly/monthly jobs. My issue is, for launchd jobs that are not handled within the "periodic" launchd environment (for example, my weekly "/usr/sbin/diskutil verifyVolume /" job that runs at a day/time way different than "periodic weekly" does), how might one get the launchd jobs to send notification emails of the outcomes of the various launchd jobs, like cron does? Because when these jobs were managed by cron, I got the notification emails. Now that launchd manages the jobs, I don't.
The lines of interest in my main.cf are pretty close to what you have specified; I'm not convinced that these things would have any bearing on my issue so I would question (totally out of ignorance on my part) how/why lines 91 and 152, which I don't have, will enable launchd on the same computer as is hosting the mailserver to send itself an email. And it'd be my 'druthers to keep line 239 mynetworks_style=host≠subnet, as an overzealous and perhaps misguided antihack tool (I can use host because I make my mail clients tunnel into my mailserver via ssh using -L 2525:localhost:25 and -L 1430:localhost:143 port tunneling directives whether they are internal or external to my LAN, so their remote host is my localhost on my computer running the mailserver so mynetworks_style=host works just fine); plus, the mailserver computer is the same computer running the verifyBootDisk script so such an email notification would never leave localhost and get onto my LAN anyways; so I'd be interested in knowing why changing that to subnet would help. I'll try it maybe this weekend and see what happens, though, nevertheless. Got nuthin' to lose and everything to gain.
Gary's post suggests that periodic and cron have the "notification email" function built into it and that launchd does not, hence, a "wrapper script" that launches the desired executable and pipes the standard output to Mail must be written. (I tried adding a Program Arguments string <string> | mail root</string> to my plist but that didn't do anything). I'll try Gary's suggestion of writing my own homegrown bash script, too, that my /Library/LaunchDaemons/verifyBootDisk.plist will reference (as opposed to it referencing /usr/sbin/diskutil as it does now), with, I envision (and hope), pretty much three lines in it:
#! bin/bash
/usr/sbin/diskutil verifyVolume / | mail root
exit 0
and I'll see what happens with that, too.