Re: SunOS 5.5 mailtool - stupid .forward symlink tricks

[martinh () mailhost emap co uk (martinh () mailhost emap co uk)]

On Mon, 24 Jun 1996, Casper Dik wrote:

> > On Thu, 30 May 1996, Neil Readwin wrote:
> >
> > > The SunOS 5.5 mailtool seems to follow symlinks when enabling the vacation
> > > feature, so if you
> > >
> > >         ln -s /var/mail/luser ~/.forward
> > >
> > > and then enable vacation it copies /var/mail/luser to ~/.forward and
> > > appends "|/usr/bin/vacation me" to it (and moves the symlink to
> > > ~/.forward..BACKUP - I'm not sure if you can do any damage using that
> > > and I no longer have a 5.5 machine handy to check it). Neil.
> >
> > When I did this 5.5 mailtool just died with a segv leaving .forward and
> > .forward..BACKUP there as symlinks. Sometimes .forward is there but is
> > a zero length file. Race condition?
> >
> > This is on a newly installed Ultra 1 140 running 5.5. Did I miss
> > something?
>
> Yeah, you should make you rmailbox mode 660, group mail, for this trick
> to work.

Downer. Tried it with that mode and mailtool still core dumped.

--------------------

% whoami
martinh
% ls -l /var/mail
total 48
drwxrwxr-x   2 root     mail         512 Jun  3 10:22 :saved
-rw-rw----   1 dsc      mail         329 Jun 17 09:20 dsc
-rw-rw----   1 martinh  mail           0 Jun  3 12:50 martinh
-rw-rw----   1 root     mail       22234 Jun 24 13:55 root
% ls -l .for*
lrwxrwxrwx   1 martinh  sysadmin      13 Jun 25 08:53 .forward ->
/var/mail/dsc
% /usr/openwin/bin/mailtool &

[enable vacation]

%
[1]  + Segmentation fault            /usr/openwin/bin/mailtool
%

---------------------

This is 5.5 Hardware 1/96 Server edition if that helps (fixed maybe).
Also if you accidentally start dtmail instead of mailtool :-), and do the
same thing it hangs. This is probably the wrong thing to do...

M.

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# Martin Hargreaves (martin () datamodl demon co uk)  Computational #
# Director, Datamodel Ltd                                Chemist #
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