procmail
[Top] [All Lists]

daily maintenance/convergent series

1997-07-11 23:27:00
I'm happy to report success on two fronts (using procmail 3.11pre7):

1. The method I suggested Thursday or Friday for using procmail to trigger
   once-a-day maintenance tasks when the first incoming message of the day
   arrives (on a system where you have no cron access, of course; otherwise
   cron is preferable) worked very well on its first try.  The slight draw-
   back is the extra kilobyte in my disk usage for a twenty-byte file, but
   one shell a day is preferable to ls or date (or certainly perl!) for every
   incoming message.

2. Yes, procmail is smart enough to know when a series is converging and
   not to keep looking for more occurrences of the expression when the
   increments for each new appearance are below the resolution of the math
   library.  This:

   * 1^.5 ^

   scored 2 and did not hang.

   Unfortunately, when it comes to recording scores of individual conditions
   in a verbose logfile or to sourcing $=, procmail rounds to the nearest
   integer, so it isn't always easy to tell.

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
  • daily maintenance/convergent series, David W. Tamkin <=