On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 11:11:46AM -0400, Homer Wilson Smith wrote:
> > > Is there a white paper on file locking and how it works, including
> > > techniques of use, particularly dotlocking and flock/fcntl?
> >
> > There may be, but in a nutshell, dot-locking is the most common
> > method used for mail spools. Qpopper always uses dot-locking as well
> > as either flock() or fcntl().
>
> Thanks Randall. I am following your advice to upgrade from
> procmail 3.13.1 and qpopper 2.52.
>
> I would like to upgrade the procmail first as it is the easiest,
> to procmail 3.15.1
>
> I was taken aback by the new procmails use of username.lock in
> /var/spool/mail to lock mailboxes. Will this be a problem with the
> locking used by qpopper 2.52 which I believe is .username.lock in the
> /var/spool/poplock directory?
IIRC, that serves a different purpose, specifically preventing
multiple popper processes from running simultaneously. The
/var/mail/username.lock or /var/spool/mail/username.lock file is used
to prevent concurrent updates to the mailspool by popper and some other
process such as mail delivery. The latter is the shared locking
mechanism that Randall and I referred to.
-- Clifton
--
Clifton Royston -- LavaNet Systems Architect -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWJD? "JWRTFM!" - Scott Dorsey (kludge) "JWG" - Eddie Aikau
