Re: modifying movemail

[Florian von Savigny]

Oops!

I <florian265@uboot.com> just wrote:


> I fear, however, that the following is a bit less than what movemail
> is expected to do:
> 
> > mv "$1" "$2"
> 
> as it does not overwrite the target Rmail file, but append to it while
> emptying the spool file. So I suppose s.th like
> 
> cat "$1" >> "$2"
> echo "" > "$1"
> 
> should do it. 

Or could this be a misconception? I just tried to read the code of
rmail-get-new-mail and rmail-insert-inbox-text, which is so
astonishingly complex that I lost count of what is happening
where. I'm no longer sure what movemail does with its arguments, but a
short test I've run suggests it does something roughly equivalent to
the following:

if [ -x "$2" ]
        echo "File $2 exists"
else
        do
        cat "$1" > "$2"
        echo "" > "$1"
done

So it seems the second argument might not be the rmail file but some
temporary file rmail mode creates. Correct?

> But movemail also converts Unix mbox format to Babyl format on the
> fly

This seems in fact to be wrong. I've just run a little test where
movemail left the contents alone (apart from moving them, that is),
and the conversion seemed to be done by rmail mode later.

So what to do? Is the little script Pascal has supplied in fact a
functional replacement for movemail, which only has to be put in its
place to work (or do I only have to apply the modification I have
explained)?

I am wondering why this is all so complex.

-- 


Florian v. Savigny

If you are going to reply in private, please be patient, as I only
check for mail something like once a week. - Si vous allez répondre
personellement, patientez s.v.p., car je ne lis les courriels
qu'environ une fois par semaine.