Re: [Nmh-workers] new command lacks lock

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Ken,

> > It offends me aesthetically though: that's a ton of wasted work.
> > Reading the directories is completely unnecessary.
>
> Understood, and I think you've convinced me.  I was just unhappy about
> the duplicated code to read sequence files.

A script that was using mark(1) was sluggish on a local-disk folder with
approx. 6,500 emails and many extra files after rmm, refile, etc.
Deleting those, or using the script on a directory with less inodes, was
a lot snappier.

I've also been caught out by mark's behaviour in the past, e.g.

    $ ls -A
    $ touch {1..5}
    $ mark -s lp -a all
    $ ls -A
    1  2  3  4  5  .mh_sequences
    $ cat .mh_sequences
    lp: 1-5
    $ rm 2
    $ cat .mh_sequences
    lp: 1-5
    $ mark -s lp -d 4
    $ cat .mh_sequences
    lp: 1 3 5
    $ ls -A
    1  3  4  5  .mh_sequences
    $

What if the `rm 2' was temporary with the script about to re-instate it
after deleting 4 from the sequence?  I expected mark to just manipulate
the compressed sequences in .mh_sequences in the simple delete case.

Cheers, Ralph.