I saw that "mailsync doesn't work from cron" problem under Ubuntu
6.06, using mailsync 5.2.1-2build1; given that unstable has 5.2.2 and
it (and libc-client) has the exact same lines of code, the analysis
below applies there too...
Given a .mailsyncrc including
channel slurp imapmail localfile {
msinfo mailsync-mail.msinfo
}
(imapmail and localfile left out as irrelevant)
I put "strace mailsync -n slurp" in cron, and saw this:
21438 open("/var/mail/anonymous/mailsync-mail/",
O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or
directory)
21438 open("/var/mail/anonymous", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY)
= -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
"That's not right" :-) Turns out that the execve line shows that cron
has a very limited environment - the only settings are
SHELL, PATH, PWD, LANG, SHLVL, HOME, LANGUAGE, LOGNAME, and _
Note that this *doesn't* include USER; I can trigger the problem
directly by doing
(unset USER; mailsync -n slurp)
Synchronizing stores "imapmail" <-> "localfile"...
Authorizing against {..../imap}
Error: Can't open mailbox mailsync-mail.msinfo: no such mailbox
Error: Couldn't open msinfo box mailsync-mail.msinfo.
Aborting!
Adding an explicit USER=eichin to the crontab *worked*, so is a
plausible workaround.
Looking at the code...
mailsync-5.2.1/src/mailsync_main.cc line 93 (in main):
// initialize c-client environment (~/.imparc etc.)
env_init( getenv("USER"), getenv("HOME"));
uw-imap-2002edebian1/src/osdep/unix/env_unix.c line 656 (in env_init):
/* myUserName must be set before dorc() call */
myUserName = cpystr (user ? user : ANONYMOUSUSER);
Also, the comment describing env_init says:
* Accepts: user name (NIL for anonymous)
I'd suggest that perhaps instead of getenv("USER") perhaps
getpwuid(geteuid()) is appropriate... or even something like
getenv("USER") || getpwuid(geteuid())->pw_name
to allow the user to set $USER and fall back to getpwuid, rather than
doing the unintentional anonymous path. The UW docs do talk about
customizing env_init, as an alternative:
http://www.washington.edu/imap/documentation/CONFIG.html
but it looks like that should be site-specific, not application
specific, and just passing something different to env_init is a better
fix.
_Mark_ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Herd Of Kittens
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