Ken Hornstein <kenh@pobox.com> writes:
But it does illustrate what I think might be a more fundamental problem with
nmh: there is no way for that a user-written script can participate in nmh's
internal locking mechanism -- or if there is I don't recall where it is
documented.
Well, here's the thing ... there is no "nmh internal locking mechanism".
Never has been! There's a perception that it is okay to run two nmh
commands simultaneously ...
I have had that perception for years now. I don't know how it got into my
head.
THAT has never been true, ever! This goes
back to the original MH design, when people were using glass terminals
and there could be as many as 25 of us all simultaneously logged into
one DEC PDP 11/45.
and nobody would ever run two commands at once.
I run some scripts off crontab. They could cause a problem if they run while I
am manually using nmh. Fortunately, they are run at night when I am likely to
be asleep. I run them at night not to avoid clashes but to not use computer
cycles and disk accesses while I am doing manual stuff. BUT on rare occasions
when I have insomnia there could be clashes. From now on I will try to
remember to be careful.
Norman Shapiro