Re: /var/mail back to /var/spool/mail
In our last exciting episode, Manoj Srivastava expounded thusly:
> What UNIX distributions do /var/mail ? DIGITAL UNIX has stuff
> in /usr/spool/mail/$USER; HPUX does /usr/mail/$USER, and Linux has
> always done /var/spool/mail/$USER. I note that POSIX.2 does not deign
> to specify the lcation of mail spool directories or mailboxes.
AFAIK, the Unix workstation vendors who have the majority of the
market are Sun, HP, and IBM; DEC's Digital Unix is a minority. The
latest versions of each of the major vendors' Unices (HP-UX 10.20,
Solaris 2.6, and AIX 4.2) all use /var/mail. (As for your assertion
that HP-UX uses /usr/mail, look more closely. /usr/mail is a symlink
to /var/mail.) I think IRIX does as well, but I dont currently have a
login on an SGI to check.
Although this has all been said before, I'll just put in my vote of
agreement for the proposed compromise. I think we should say that
eventually the mailboxes should be in /var/mail, but that currently,
as a transitional feature, they can be located in either /var/mail or
/var/spool/mail, with a symlink in the other place. Then we can
remove the compatibility mandate at some point in the future when most
of the distributions have migrated to the preferred location. Being a
distribution developer myself, I think this is quite a fair
compromise.
--
Mark D. Roth (roth@uiuc.edu)
System Administrator, CCSO Workstation Services Group
http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/roth
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