The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in effect since May 25, 2018.  GDPR doesn't just affect enterprises in the EU, though; theoretically at least, any entity that stores personal information pertaining to an EU citizen – regardless of whether or not that entity does business in the EU – is also subject to its provisions regarding personal data storage.  If you're not sure about the basics of GDPR, you might want to take a look at our 2017 newsletter article entitled "Ready for GDPR?  Test Your Knowledge, Get The Facts."

GDPR requires, among other things, that a company must be able to provide on demand a report in a common machine-readable format (such as XML) which lists every instance of a customer's personal data held by that company.  For LISTSERV, that can be a tricky prospect, because personal data may be held in list archives, in changelogs, and of course in subscription lists themselves.

In response, L-Soft developed a PowerShell script which, using either the LCMD.EXE or LCMDX.EXE command interfaces that ship with the Windows version of LISTSERV, can pull the relevant data using standard LISTSERV commands and methods, and produce an XML report containing the results.  While the script itself is Windows-specific, by using the LCMDX.EXE option (which communicates directly with the server's TCPGUI port), it is possible to generate reports from any unix-based LISTSERV site as well, so long as the site has the LISTSERV web interface enabled.

The script also works under PowerShell Core 6.1 and later, making it possible to run the script from Linux and MacOS workstations by using the unix version of 'lcmdx'.

Contents:

14.1 Technical requirements, downloading, etc.

14.2 Windows: Installing, configuring, executing

14.3 Linux/MacOS: Installing, configuring, executing

14.4 Command line parameter reference

14.5 Output

14.6 Caveats and disclaimers