"Edward J. Sabol" <sabol(_at_)alderaan(_dot_)gsfc(_dot_)nasa(_dot_)gov> writes:
Excerpts from mail: (19-Dec-96) procmail hangs under IRIX 6.2 by Steve Kelley
How does procmail handle file locks if no trailing ":" is specified for a
receipe?
It doesn't do any locking if no lock is specified (either by a trailing ":"
or via the global lockfile specified by the LOCKFILE variable).
Well.....not quite. If writing to a Berkeley style (single file) mailbox
and any kernel locking styles (fcntl, lockf, or flock) were configured in,
then procmail will do the kernel locking regardless of whether a trailing
':' is in place. The trailing colon just controls dotlocking style. If
you don't believe me, put
VERBOSE=on
:0 c
$HOME/foo
in your .procmailrc, send a message to yourself and look at the logfile.
However, before someone says "aha, that's what's going on here", I'll
point out that procmail -v in this case showed that procmail was
configured to only do dotlocking, so this is not the cause of Steve
Kelley's problems.
Rather, I'm wondering whether this is a NFS V3 mount, and what platform
is the NFS server? We've experienced many occasions where processes on
SGIs running 6.2 have gone into totally unkillable states (you can
trace the process, send a SIGKILL and watch the tracer say "SIGKILL
received". Cute). We recently received the latest "Varsity Support
Pack" which includes a new NFS V3 subsystem (NFSV3 version 1.2) that
appears to fix it for us.
The procmail process would simply hang on the system. While this process was
hung, you could not touch the $HOME/nsmail directory with any command. If
you did an "ls -l $HOME/nsmail", your process would hang. The hung processes
could not be killed.
This should never happen and indicates an OS bug, period. Yell and
scream at SGI until they can either explain how "ls" can hang like this
or supply you with a patch.
Philip Guenther