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From: nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew
Subject: PS -- Re: messages - a confession
Message-ID: <oaaa0hK0M2Yt03oUUh@thumper.bellcore.com>
Date: 10 Jul 90 23:09:33 GMT
References: <waaY37C1eVVaMX24JW@northstar.dartmouth.edu>
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Also, you should bear in mind, in trying to understand this problem,
that /usr/ucb/mail doesn't do any file write operations at all in order 
-- it just reads the /usr/spool/mail/xxx file and prints out parts of it
as needed.  There are a number of technical reasons why this is a
terrible idea, but it tends to be a lot faster ESPECIALLY when, as is
usually the case, /usr/spool/mail is on the local disk but ~/.MESSAGES
is on a file server somewhere...