i've never seen the behavior you describe since adopting MH back in 1982 or so. at least in The Good Ol' Days, the refile operation was done with a link-unlink syscall pair and there is essentially no way for that to impact the contents of a file.
in fact, i doubt seriously that the contents of the file matters one whit as to whether this happens.
you didn't mention which version of FreeBSD you were running or whether you might have the ~/Mail directory mounted via NFS. i know there is considerable angst over filesystem weirdness in the 5.x branch of FreeBSD (hence my server running 4.works for the last several years).
the 0xFFs sound suspiciously like the block erasure that's done when file blocks are freed, usually when the link count goes to zero.
if i were guessing (which I am), it sounds like there's a race condition between the link and unlink and the inode ref count getting updated incorrectly, thereby triggering an erasure. i believe that all the blocks are cleaned before the blocks are released back to the freelists. i haven't looked at the code in a long time, but given the new locking code in 5.x, it's not impossible to imagine that getting hosed and produce the result you are seeing.
again i'm speculating, but you are running 5.x, you may have found a way to provoke a bug with some regularity, if not precisely reproduce it. in that case, i suggest you raise the issue on the 5.x kernel list.
-mo
Martin McCormick wrote:
I use nmh-1.0.4 in FreeBSD UNIX and have noticed that the refile function occasionally eats a message. It moves it from one folder to another all right, but what ends up in the receiving folder is a file containing all 0xFF's.
I have tried to capture a message that triggers this behavior but it is difficult since most messages do not self-destructand refile corectly. When one does shred, I can't get it back to experiment with because, by definition of the problem, it is simply gone.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group
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