Subject: Pine 3.95: problem with locking file

From: Mihai Ibanescu <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 19:06:16 +0300

What do I have to do to make Pine understand that I want the lok
files in /tmp, and not in /var/spool/mail/xxxxxx.MyServer?

I have this error every time I enter Pine and my mailbox is not empty:

[Error creating/var/spool/mail/misa.lock.843667486.10412.thor.infoiasi.ro:
Permission denied...

I assume that I have to modify something in the sources and recompile
Pine. But I don't know where.

Please respond to [email-masked]

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 12:51:11 -0700

The answer to your question is:

You can not, because this decision is not under Pine's control.

These locks are between Pine and sendmail's delivery program (usually
/bin/mail).  The authors of /bin/mail (or whatever you used) decided that
their lock is on /var/spool/mail.  If Pine is to lock against the sendmail
delivery program, it must write the locks that the sendmail delivery
program uses.

Of course, you can modify the Pine source code, but if you don't also
modify the /bin/mail source code with corresponding changes then there is
no locking between Pine and sendmail.

"No locking between Pine and sendmail" is the situation you have now; that
is why you are getting a warning message.  In older versions of Pine, you
got no warning message.  You just didn't have locking unless your
/bin/mail respected the 4.3BSD flock() convention on /var/spool/mail (very
few systems do this today since it doesn't work over NFS), and every so
often you would get lost messages or other mail file corruption.

What you need to do is permit world write access on /var/spool/mail with
the sticky bit; that is, protection 1777.

Pine also has a separate lock against other invocations of Pine; these use
/tmp.  That's right, there are *TWO* locks.

> Please respond to [email-masked]

-- Mark --	Read http://www.imap.org for the "best kept secret in email"

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.