Re: procmail locking problem

[Kenneth Stephen <y2kmvs@ebiz.austin.ibm.com>]

On Thu, 19 Sep 2002, Bob Proulx wrote:

>
> > > message should be for /var/mail/y2kmvs.lock and not /var/spool/mail.
>
> I like to peek into the binary to make sure of what I am getting.
> Therefore I ran 'strings' on /usr/bin/procmail and see this.
>
>   strings /usr/bin/procmail |grep /var
>   /var/mail/
>
> It shows /var/mail/ and not /var/spool/mail/.  If mail "falls off the
> end" of your ~/.procmailrc file then that should be the value of
> DEFAULT unless DEFAULT is overridden.  The man page confirms this.
>
>        /var/mail/$LOGNAME.lock
>                               lockfile  for  the  system  mailbox
>                               (not automatically  used  by  proc
>                               mail,    unless   $DEFAULT   equals
>                               /var/mail/$LOGNAME and procmail  is
>                               delivering to $DEFAULT)
>
> Next I would guess a check of ~/.procmailrc and /etc/procmail is in
> order to double check that this is not getting explicitly set to
> someplace unexpected.  At this point I really expect you will find
> something there that is setting DEFAULT.  (I seem to recall that even
> if this is changed procmail will place lockfiles in /var/mail/ and
> that is a bug getting fixed in development versions.  So YMMV here.)
>
Bob,

	You the man! I had been explicitly specifying DEFAULT to
/var/spool/mail in .procmailrc. I fixed that and now the problem has gone
away.

Thanks,
Kenneth