I'm not sure why this is happening. procmail generates this error when
it tries retrieving the uid for a given user; is something blocking it
for some reason? Is the password file being updated automatically,
giving the possibility of failed system calls for applications such as
procmail?
As it turns out, we have recently installed a program that is frequently
making changes to the passwd file. It looks as though procmail is just
suffering from really bad timing. I've talked to the developers of this
other program and hopefully they will be able to change the way that their
program rewrites the passwd file.
Thanks for your suggestion. It pointed me in the right direction!
Hmmm. Hopefully they're not overwriting the existing password file,
but writing a new one and then moving it into place. It's a little
less race-conditionish...
If you want to modify procmail to use a different lookup
scheme, you'll have to modify the cgetpwnam and cgetpwuid subroutines
in authenticate.c.
Because getpwam and getpwuid are built into your system, they assume
that you want to lookup info from /etc/passwd. You could write your
own to do lookups in another file, but you'll need all of the same
fields. I'm not sure what it will gain you, unless you're trying to
get entries from another source (i.e. AFS, Radius, Kerberos...).
Chris