Guy Geens writes on 30 May 1997 at 09:33:02
"era" == era eriksson <era(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi> writes:
era> AFAIK you are going to have a hard time getting a Unix program
era> running on something that is not Unix. (NT, being POSIX, probably
era> stands a chance -- anyone have any experience with porting
[...]
NT is *not* POSIX compliant. It has an optional POSIX module that
allows you to run programs with a POSIX personality.
There are third-party tools available which implement most of the
POSIX APIs in the Win32 subsystem.
Getting back to "procmail"...with all the discussion about POP
accounts and the like; it seems like the Windows world needs a decent
tool like "procmail". Of course, they'd want a fancy GUI on it too,
but that could come later.
I don't think there is a whole lot of stuff in procmail that is
inherently UNIX - at least looking at it from the .rc and man pages
(haven't nosed around much in the source). There are the usual issues
with fork() and surely some quirks with pipes; the biggest thing that
comes to mind right now is "!" (or "| $SENDMAIL") - that is an
implicit dependency on sendmail.
There are of course other issues such as a myriad of proprietary
mailbox formats (even the idea of a "mail file" is foreign in some
cases), but to keep things simple, assume the use of Eudora which
uses the UNIX mailbox format. Nevertheless, it would seem that the
most common use of procmail - sorting into folders based on regexps -
would work under Windows.
Dan
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J. Daniel Smith <DanS(_at_)bristol(_dot_)com>
http://www.bristol.com/~DanS
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