From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!whm.arizona@Rand-Relay
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: aliases to pipes in delivermail
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.896
Posted: Wed Mar 30 00:46:20 1983
Received: Tue Apr 19 00:47:03 1983

We encountered a mysterious problem with using aliases to pipes
in delivermail.  Our current mail system is the mmdf/delivermail
hybrid that the CSNET people have distributed in a rather cavalier
fashion.

We were attempting to use an alias:
	foo: "|foo"
when we tried mailing to foo, there were no problems.  When mailing
to foo@arizona (forcing the mail through the mmdf system), delivermail
would get the "Service Unavailable" error.  The shell was returning
a status of 1 and not executing the program.  delivermail uses the
Cshell for pipe aliases.  I tried using the Bourne shell instead
of the Cshell (using a -c rather than a -fc argument) and it worked.

Does anybody know (perhaps Eric@Berkeley could speak) why /bin/csh is
used in delivermail instead of /bin/sh?  We've changed it locally
and haven't had any problems.