Re: SunOS 5.5 mailtool - stupid .forward symlink tricks

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

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?

M.

##################################################################
# Martin Hargreaves (martin () datamodl demon co uk)  Computational #
# Director, Datamodel Ltd                                Chemist #
# Contract Unix system admin/Unix security              Sysadmin #
##################################################################