Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!daily-planet.concordia.ca!alcor!smw From: smw@alcor.concordia.ca ( Steven Winikoff ) Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix Subject: Need help with mh *and* mail on RISC/Ultrix 4.1 Message-ID: Date: 13 May 91 19:38:59 GMT Sender: usenet@daily-planet.concordia.ca Lines: 50 I'm having two separate problems, one with mh and one with /usr/ucb/mail. Both occur regularly under Ultrix 4.1 on a DECsystem 5500 and on a DECstation 2100. First, mh: I have *not* configured mh in any way. We're running the standard vanilla flavour of mh that comes with the 4.1 unsupported subsets. Whenever I try to perform a shell escape under vi as called from the "comp" command, it fails with the message "csh: Permission denied" (This occurs with the vi shell escape syntax of ":!cmd". For whatever reason, when invoked as "!!cmd", things work as they should!) This behaviour is independent of the nature of the command. I've tried shell builtins, I've tried relative paths, absolute paths, I've even tried using /bin/sh and /local/bin/tcsh instead of /bin/csh. What's going on???? With /usr/ucb/mail, one of our users is trying to save his outgoing mail. "No problem", you say. All he has to do is set record=~/some_file in his .mailrc, right? That's what I thought too. That's what the man page says he *should* be able to do. Can he do it? Nope. All that he gets for his pains is the message "is a directory" It doesn't even attempt to explain just what it thinks is a directory, and it certainly doesn't explain why it thinks that. This is decidedly unfriendly. If anyone has any ideas about what's happening here, *please* let me know! Thanks a lot, Steven ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Steven Winikoff smw@antares.concordia.ca Software Analyst Dept. of Computing services Concordia University voice: (514) 848-7619 Montreal, Quebec, Canada (10:00-18:00 EST)