Ken,
> Exactly HOW many messages are in mhe-index?
exactly
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bash archlinux (master): {49536} find ~/MHE-INDEX/ -type f | wc
173477 173477 7838026
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but, is that that many? in my overall Mail directory
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bash archlinux (master): {49516} find ~/Mail/ -type f | wc
1499737 1499739 63526598
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i.e., an order of magnitude more.
nevertheless, if i put (what is now) ~/MHE-INDEX back under ~/Mail, i
get the very large malloc failure.
hmm...
bingo.
i'm sitting in ~/Mail/MHE-INDEX:
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bash archlinux (master): {49603} ls -a 74600607886815/
./ ../ .mhe_index
bash archlinux (master): {49605} mkdir ~/BAD-MHE-INDEX
bash archlinux (master): {49606} mv 74600607886815/ !$
mv 74600607886815/ ~/BAD-MHE-INDEX
bash archlinux (master): {49607} flist -all | wc
181 1629 12308
bash archlinux (master): {49608} mv ~/BAD-MHE-INDEX/74600607886815/ .
bash archlinux (master): {49609} flist -all | wc
flist: malloc failed, size wanted: 9207885440
0 0 0
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it seems that at some point i had done a search for 74600607886815 (your
basic "magic number" :). mh-e, i guess, had created a directory with
that number as its name (it uses the search term to name subfolders
under the normal mhe-index folder). and, i guess, flist decided that
(under the ~/Mail/MHE-INDEX folder) was a message number?
does that make sense? i guess mh-e could not create such subfolders
with names consisting only of decimal integers (i have some
hexadecimal-named folders which don't seem to give a problem). or, i
could not search for such. or, maybe flist (or, nmh in general?) could
not think that a directory was a message?
cheers, Greg