I have a private copy of procmail v3.10 in my bin directory (not
installed by the sys admin). An associate maintains a softlink in his
bin directory to procmail and formail.
For the recipe:
# The following recipe processes email that was received from the VAX.
# It cleans up the To, From and CC headers to be UNIX correct
#
:0
* ^From.*sys2
{
VAXFROM="`/u/wjenuwin/bin/formail -xFrom: | awk '{print $1}' `"
[rest snipped, including nawk scripts]
Probably this is a red herring, but some versions of *awk lying around
need "-" as an argument to read from stdin.
It doesn't make a lot of sense with your claim that this hangs
"once a month" so may well not be the problem, unless mail enters
that recipe once per month or so.
My 1.8 cents (been hit by inflation)
Cheers,
Stan.