When Luke Davis suggested making $ORGMAIL a symlink pointing elsewhere, I
mentioned that procmail will not deliver to a symlink if it points to an
existing plain file or if it is broken (procmail will if it points to an
existing directory, I believe, especially if you add a trailing slash [or /.
for an MH-type mail directory] to the symlink's name).
Luke responded,
| Yup, forgot about that.
| You could hard link it; but often /var/spool/mail is not on the same
| filesystem as standard user's filesystems; thus a soft link.
Nope, sorry; even if they're on the same filesystem and the kernel will
allow you to create the hard link, it still won't work. Procmail will not
deliver to a file with more than one hard link.
The reason is the same: if a file has two or more names, two simultaneous
procmail processes can try to lock the two different names + $LOCKEXT and
each think they have the lock at the same time.
(If a file has only one hard link but there is also a symlink pointing to
it, procmail will deliver to it, but only by the name of the hard link.)