procmail
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Re: when a pipe *should* stop early

1997-09-19 20:57:54
dattier(_at_)wwa(_dot_)com (David W. Tamkin) writes:
I've a filter recipe that is supposed to drop the last part of the body.
Currently it's a q instruction in sed.

Now, what happens if a buffer boundary happens to occur during the unused
part, and procmail senses a write error?  It hasn't happened yet, but it
might.  I don't want to put the `i' flag on the recipe, because then any
other write errors, which I would care to know about, would be ignored.

I believe that all the other causes of write errors would also cause
the sed or intermediate shell to have a non-zero exit code, which the
'w' flag should catch.  However, as you certainly know, David, I have
been wrong before, and I expect it'll happen again at least a few times
before I finish becoming infallible.


Should I change the sed instruction from q to !d [or p with the -n option]
so that sed will accept the entire text?  (Normally that is a suboptimal way
to write sed code.)

Paranoia will often cost you something.  This is an example.


Philip Guenther

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