Subject: Problem w/ PINE addressbook

From: partner <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 14:08:43 -0400 (EDT)

Don't know when it happened, but now when I go into addressbook the FIRST
time during a PINE session, a message flashes across the status line(?)
(down near the bottom), which says (approx)  addressbook.lu is
invalid, rebuilding.  It does that. Nothing else happens, and my
addressbook seems to work OK. What does that mean? How can I fix it?

I've asked "vnet.net" provider, but they have not been able to help.

Any suggestions?

--
Lou Weber
Computer Assist
918 Nottingham Drive
Charlotte, NC 28211
Voice/Fax 704/364-8090
<[email-masked]>

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 09:30:35 +0100 (BST)

Pine makes a secondary "lookup" file for each of your addressbooks.  If
this doesn't exist or, for some reason, is out of date Pine automatically
rebuilds it and warns you it is doing so.

This lookup file is placed in the same directory as the addressbook file,
and has the same name but with ".lu" appended (this is for UNIX; I can't
remember the name used for PC-Pine).

When the lookup file has been rebuilt in this way it should be fine for
the remainder of the current Pine session and for future ones.

HOWEVER if you don't have write access to the directory in which the
lookup file lives then Pine can't save the rebuilt version there.  Instead
it puts it in a temporary directory just for this session.  Subsequent
Pine sessions will detect that the lookup file still isn't correct in its
official place, and will rebuild it again (back into the temporary
directory).

The solution is to make sure you have write access to the directory in
which your addressbook files live.  For UNIX this is typically your home
directory, so it would be extremely unusual to experience this problem
(unless you've run out of disk space and the file wasn't created
properly?).

However some people use global (shared) addressbooks, and only have read
access to them and the directory they live in.  If the person who
maintains this global addressbook makes a change to the addresses but
forgets to update the lookup file then the problem you describe will
happen at every Pine startup for everyone who uses that global
addressbook.

The moral is that if you maintain a global addressbook make sure you use
the "pine -create_lu addrbook sort-option" command to update the
associated lookup file (and make sure both addressbook and lookup file are
readable by the people who use them!).  The "-create_lu" command line
option is described in Pine's manual page: "man pine".

Cheers,

Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
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