Subject: bug report: pine cpu-loops waiting on filter

From: David Nessl <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 May 1997 18:09:30 -0400 (EDT)

Given the pine display filter config

   _BEGINNING("-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED")_ /home/david/pine-filter-bug

and the shell program pine-filter-bug which contains the two lines

    #!/bin/sh
    head -1 </dev/tty

then when trying to display a message that triggers the filter, pine will
continuously burn CPU time until the filter finishes, e.g. while the
filter is waiting for human input.  (This is a simplified case for
debugging purposes -- a customer used up much of his monthly computing
quota when he got distracted with a phone call while my PGP-integration
filter was prompting him to enter his PGP Pass Phrase.) 

I've duplicated this behavior using pine 3.96 on Linux and pine 3.95 on
AIX 4.1.5

This is a bad thing on a multi-user system, especially one which tracks
resource usage (like ours). 

David R Nessl  -- Coordinator, Computer Systems (sysprog/sysadmin)
http://www.nerdc.ufl.edu/~david