procmail
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Re: When is a .forward not a .forward

1997-12-05 21:37:45
John Ahearn asked,

| I installed it as per MITS instructions, which I believe said to
|       cd ~
|       ln -s .procmail/forward .forward
| 
| Well, apparently that caused the problem. No mail went to procmail.
| 
| When I removed the .forward link, and replaced it:
|       rm ~/.forward
|       cp ~/.procmail/forward ~/.forward
| 
| Procmail worked. (subsequent tests proved this).
| 
| My question is -- why would procmail treat a link to a file any differently
| than the actual file itself?

Perhaps your MTA will not accept a .forward that is a symlink, just as
procmail has restrictions on what permissions it will tolerate on an rcfile.
For example (I'm just guessing here) it can tell whether it can read the
target file but it cannot tell who might be able to write to it.

What happens if ~/.forward is a *hard* link to the same inode as
~/.procmail/forward?

If nothing else, you can always put the real file at ~/.forward and let
~/.procmail/forward be a symlink to it.