pktdump is a utility to dump the headers and optionally the body of raw FTN packets.

pktdump [-body] <file1.pkt> [file2.pkt] [...]

/sbbs/exec/pktdump /sbbs/ftn/out/fidonet/*.?ut

At one point in time, I had a lot of pkts that got abandoned due to a misconfiguration of my mailer. This misconfiguration resulted in the mailer not being able to access the pkt files but it could access the BSO .?lo files. When it found it could not access the pkts listed in the flo file, it deleted the flo file resulting in the pkts being abandoned. Since I didn't want that mail to be lost, I wrote a script that used pktdump to retrieve the destination addresses from the pkts and create new flo files for them.

# make a list of pkt destination addresses
/sbbs/exec/pktdump /sbbs/fido/outbound/*.pkt | \
  egrep -e "Packet Type .* from $MYFTNADDR to " | \
  cut -d " " -f 12 | sort -V | uniq

# choose an address from the above list
# get a list of pkts destined there and
# move those pkts to the tmp directory
/sbbs/exec/pktdump /sbbs/fido/outbound/*.pkt | \
  egrep -e "Packet Type .* from $MYFTNADDR to $DESTADDR" | \
  cut -d " " -f 1 | tr '\n' '\0' | \
  xargs -0 -n1 -i mv '{}' /sbbs/tmp

# create a flo file with the pkts
printf "$(ls -d -1 $PWD/*.pkt | \
  sed 's/^/\^/')\n" > \
  $(printf "%04x%04x.flo\n" $DESTNET $DESTNODE)

The above script snippets result in a BSO flo file being created in the current directory with a list of pkts in the temporary directory. You only need to move the flo file to the proper FTN outbound directory for the mailer to find it and send the pkts from the temporary directory. This script example helped me to recover several thousand pkts that were abandoned over night on my hub system.

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