Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!usc!apple!agate!ucbvax!THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM!howard From: howard@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Howard Bussey) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: messages, eatmail and other miscellany Message-ID: Date: 19 Nov 90 17:29:30 GMT References: <9011161944.AA26842@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 35 I run Nathaniel's eatmail program in a particular context: My mail is delivered to a general-purpose (and oftimes overloaded) machine, but I read mail from a variety of workstations. To do this, I use eatmail to grab mail from the un*x mailbox and move it to ~/Mailbox. eatmail is run from the per-use crontab available (at least) on SunOS 4.0.x. My crontab includes the following entry (but you can use at jobs or any other method to run eatmail periodically): 1,6,11,16,21,26,31,36,41,46,51,56 * * * * eatmail -l/u/howard/.EatMailLog The -l/path/to/file parameter is to make eatmail log something when it grabs some mail. (If it runs but my mailbox (/usr/spool/mail/howard for me) is empty, eatmail doesn't change my .EatMailLog file). I make xbiff look at my mail log via the following line in my .xinitrc: xbiff -file /u/howard/.EatMailLog -geometry -1+0 & Finally, I arrange to have mail collection empty .EatMailLog via the following line in my preferences file: *.PersonalMailCollectionCommand: cat /dev/null >/u/howard/.EatMailLog There may be a race condition between eatmail trying to append a line to .EatMailLog and the cat command run by messages/cui/vui trying to empty .EatMailLog, but as this is just a log file, an error either way is self-correcting and results in either (1) I get mail late; or (2) xbiff claims I got mail when I have already examined all new mail. I haven't run into either situation, so I don't think the potential race condition is terribly important. -------------------------------------------------------------- Howard Bussey Bellcore Room 2P-288/445 South Street/Morristown NJ 07962-1910 voice: +201 829 44 79; fax: +201 984 22 83