Did your machine actually halt? Did you have less than 90 MB Ram+Swap?
No - but I had to hard-boot it. It ran out of memory and I ended up being
unable to even kill the processes or reboot as there wasn't enough memory
for any other commands. As it was, it pointed out a bug in my procmailrc
file - I was forking off copies of formail at several rules when one would
have done the lot - so it made me clean up the code ;-)
Is this considered a bug? What would /bin/mail have done with the message?
As /bin/mail wouldn't had to process anything, I'd say it may just start
writing to /var/spool/.... Procmail by definition does more than that so
you've got to be careful.
Did the MTA do a bounce of any kind?
Nope - I invoke procmail with the "-Y" option, so the message was just
requeued - so after the reboot I manually stopped sendmail and moved the
message out of the queue - and dealt to it with vi.
I guess that's my point, a human plus vi could do more efficiently than
procmail could (wow, a human's more useful than a program ;-))
--
Jason Haar, Unix/Networking Specialist, Trimble Navigation New Zealand
Phone: +64 3 3391377 Fax: +64 3 3391417