sendmail, 4th Edition

hoststat (V8.8 and Later)

The hoststat command is a synonym for the -bh command-line switch. It causes sendmail to print its persistent host status and exit. Persistent host status is enabled with the HostStatusDirectory option (HostStatusDirectory on page 1037).

The output produced by this command begins with a heading such as this:

-------------- Hostname --------------- How long ago ---------Results---------

Then, for each host whose status it has saved, sendmail prints this information:

Hostname

This is the name of the host that was connected to. It might not be the hostname specified for the recipient. It could easily be an MX record instead. If a message has multiple recipients, a separate status line will be produced for each unique host that is tried. If this name is prefixed with an asterisk, the status file is locked and currently being updated.

How long ago

This shows how long ago this status record was updated. It is printed in the form:

DD+HH:MM:SS

Here, DD is the number of days. If the status were updated less than one day ago, the DD+ is omitted. The HH is hours, the MM is minutes, and the SS is seconds. The colons are literal.

Results

This shows the result of the last connection attempt, failure, or success. If no reason was stored, this prints as:

No status available

If a result was stored, it will print in two parts:

smtp msg

The smtp is the SMTP reply code. The msg is the text of the message generated by the other end or other program.

To illustrate, consider this output:

-------------- ...