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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.uwa.edu.au!classic.iinet.com.au!swing.iinet.net.au!news.uoregon.edu!chi-news.cic.net!simtel!swidir.switch.ch!scsing.switch.ch!news.belwue.de!news.uni-ulm.de!rz.uni-karlsruhe.de!news.uni-stuttgart.de!uni-regensburg.de!lrz-muenchen.de!faui0n.informatik.uni-erlangen.de!uni-erlangen.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!not-for-mail From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: mail doesn't work on my 2.0.5 machine??? Date: 29 Oct 1995 18:10:26 +0100 Organization: Private FreeBSD site, Dresden. Lines: 28 Message-ID: <470ci2$17s@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <46kg5o$5mr@ender.techcenter.paccar.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: uriah.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Arlen Fletcher <fletcher@techcenter.paccar.com> wrote: > >Having a devil of a time getting /usr/bin/mail to write >any messages to disk. It'll read mail for a user if the >/var/mail/username file exists, but it won't create it for >new mail and it's not logging why. What permissions do I >need on the /var/mail directory? > >BTW, /usr/libexec/mail.local works just fine to create >new messages... writes the /var/mail/username file as it >should. And sendmail works 'cause /etc/daily & friends >use it for cron reports to root. Yup, now that you even know about /usr/libexec/mail.local, why the heck do you want /usr/bin/mail write messages to the disk? It's *not supposed to*! It's rather supposed to hand the messages off to the sendmail daemon, which can finally decide to transfer it to mail.local. The dual nature of previous /bin/mail commands (mail user agent, plus local delivery agent) caused a big grief in many cases. I think the 4.4BSD solution to decouple local delivery and transfer this task to /usr/libexec/mail.local is a bright idea. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)