Re: SunOS 5.5 mailtool - stupid .forward symlink tricks

[casper () holland Sun COM (Casper Dik)]

> 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?

Yeah, you should make you rmailbox mode 660, group mail, for this trick to work.


The workaround is chmod 600 /var/mail/*.  The files need not be group writable.
If you also make "keep" the default in /etc/mail/mailx.rc, then there should
be no problem with mailboxes reverting back to the default 660 mode.

(Needless to say that the bug in mailtool needs to be fixed anyway)

Casper