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From: leres@ace.ee.lbl.gov (Craig Leres)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d
Subject: Re: Cmail - check to see who's read their mail - UNIX
Message-ID: <4042@helios.ee.lbl.gov>
Date: 29 Oct 89 04:20:19 GMT
References: <4006@helios.ee.lbl.gov> <2337@convex.UUCP> <2337@convex.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@helios.ee.lbl.gov
Reply-To: leres@helios.ee.lbl.gov (Craig Leres)
Followup-To: alt.sources.d
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley
Lines: 14

Tom Christiansen writes:
> Only if your vendor hasn't fixed biff(1) to save the st_atime from when
> it stats the file and restore it with utimes(2) after you're done reading.

The idea of hacking comsat to restore the access time is clever. Mind
you, I don't like the race. But I suppose you could lock the mail drop
while reading and updating the times. But that's probably not necessary
because if you're already using biff to find out about new mail and you
lose the race, the worst that happens is that csh won't notice that new
mail has arrived.

		Craig

P.S. In this case, my "vendor" is Berkeley.