Re: terminal problems with emacs

["Jeffrey Ebert" <jebert@hns.com>]

On Nov 10,  4:42pm, Matthew Swift wrote:
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 2)
>
> I wrote a small sh script which calls popclient.  I have biff
> installed and running.  When I call it from
> the command line or have cron call it, everything works fine.  When I
> have Emacs call the same thing by setting `mh-inc-prog' to the script,
> it works fine except for these two permissions errors:
>
>   popclient: clearbiffbit: fchmod: Operation not permitted
>
>   popclient: restorebiffbit: fchmod: Operation not permitted

I had this problem when I ran popclient from the command-line with my primary
account. It worked fine for root. I fixed it by doing 'chmod u+s popclient' as
root. If you've already done this to popclient, perhaps you need to do it to
your script as well?

By the way, if anyone can explain exactly what this u+s thing does, I would
appreciate it. As far as I can understand it, it gives the permissions of the
file owner to the script at execution time even if someone else is executing
it. Can anybody add technical clarification to this (or tell me I'm clueless)?
Can somebody comment on what a setuid root program can and cannot do?

GG

-- 
Jeffrey Ebert                   Hughes Network Systems
jebert@hns.com                  (301) 548-1292