Herold,

Did you check the queue entries with conshell to see if the "user" running the task (BY: xxxx) was the same as your account, or is it a different user?

The user to run the task (on Unix) is determined by the owner of the file created in the auto-processing directory, or the user doing the 'enque' command if a background task is being entered directly with the 'enque' command.

Perhaps that particular user, if it is different, is not set up correctly on the system running the bgquer service (and thus the queued tasks) to send mail?

Just a shot-in-the-dark.

Only asking this because of not being able to see the "details", but is the value of $PDF_FILE being used for the -a switch a full path?

If you're seeing the $PDF_FILE expanded in your log files, then that would seem to indicate that it's the full path when running in the background queue via auto-processing.

In Conshell, you click on a Log entry for the specific queue to expand the entry and show the full command that was entered by auto-processing and run by the bgquer service. But you'll only see the (full) command that it ran and the last message (Progress: xxx) that was written out to standard output by the command, unless error messages were written to standard error (which are all displayed).

This is what I see in the Conshell.

Nothing showing the mailx command string.

Yes, as I said the "Progress:" line of a Log entry in Conshell shows only the last message that is written by the process to standard output.

If you want your mailx command string to show on the "Progress:" line of the Log entry then the last thing your command should write (or echo) to standard output would be the mailx command string.

Either that or write (echo) you mailx command to standard error (at any point) and it will always be shown in the Log entry (when you click on it) as an error message; however I think that will make the bgquer service think that the task "failed" (if anything is written out by the task to standard error). But you could just temporarily do that just to see what you get.