On Wed, Jul 05, 2000 at 03:05:53PM -0400, Michael Soulier wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 05, 2000 at 08:39:47PM +0200, Marius Gedminas wrote:
>
> > Locking. For Mutt's dotlocking to work, your /var/spool/mail directory
> > should be writable by group `mail', and your `mutt_dotlock' should be
> > sgid mail.
>
> Where can I find information on this?
On this list. :)
> I just grepped through the entire
> manual for "lock", and I didn't find anything on this.
Well, the $dotlock_program variable is described there. And there's a
reference to mutt_dotlock(8) man page (although the reader is expected
to unserstand that "(8)" after "mutt_dotlock" makes it a reference).
But you're right, the available documentation on this issue is sparse
and incomplete. :-/ There could be a couple of sentences in the manual
detailing Mutt's locking mechanisms, mentioning facts like that
dotlocking does not work with msdos/vfat filesystems, while fcntl/flock
is unreliable over NFS...
> [bmerh56e-msoulier-msoulier]$ cd /var
> [bmerh56e-msoulier-var]$ ll -d mail
> drwxrwxr-x 2 bin mail 1024 Jul 5 14:32 mail/
>
> Ok, the directory is writable by mail...
>
> So, what's a "mutt_dotlock"?
It's a program (part of the Mutt package) that implements NFS-safe file
locking. To ensure that different programs do not write to the same
mailbox at once (thus corrupting it), mutt_dotlock creates a lock file
in the same directory (that's why the directory has to belong to the
group `mail', be group-writable, and mutt_dotlock has to be sgid mail).
Check its permissions with
$ ls -l `which mutt_dotlock`
Marius Gedminas
--
"Nuclear war can ruin your whole compile."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
