Running external program on Scrip Action

RT Users
1

Hi!
I’m trying to do some pdf parsing by invoking “pdftotext” from an action:

my ($rh, $wh);
my $pid = open2( $rh, $wh ,"pdftotext - -" ); 
print $wh decode_base64($attachment);          
$wh->close();
while (<$rh>) {
    # process
}
$rh->close();

This code works when invoked directly from a shell, but fails to produce any output when invoked as a Scrip Action.
Could this be related to apache? Or the way rt runs actions? Any clue?

Thanks!

2

My first guess would be where is that file being written to, maybe Apache doesn’t have Linux rights to create a file in that directory?

3

The first attempt used temporary files, so that is what I thought as well.

This second version of the code does not create any file, it uses instead $rh and $wh streams to feed input and collect the output.

4

What output are you expecting? You can try adding some logging statements using RT::Logger->error();

1 Like
5

Ok, by using open3 and RT::Logger I saw errors on stderr.
This was due to the fact that the attachment was already decoded from base64, after removing decode_base64() everything works.

Thanks