procmail
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Re: mailstat message

1998-11-04 21:17:48
Jeff <schaller(_at_)learjet(_dot_)com> writes:
I run mailstat in cron every night at midnight, and occasionally in
its output is the following line:
     0       1  ## procmail: Couldn't unlock "intp.lock"

'intp' is an incoming mail folder I have.  It's fairly active, so
sometimes I'll have it open (using Pine) while messages arrive. I know
more than 1 or 2 messages come in while I'm doing that, though, so I'm
not sure if that's what's causing it.  Could it be two messages
arriving in quick succession, or maybe Pine opening the folder (or
closing it) right as procmail is saving a message to it? Or maybe when
I'm expunging deleted messages from the folder?  It doesn't cause any
real problems, but I'm curious to see if it's something I can
eliminate.

The "Couldn't unlock" message is generated when procmail tries to
remove the lockfile (intp.lock in this case) and fails, almost
certainly because some other process already removed it (none of the
other possible error that the unlink() system call can encounter make
sense here).  I would guess that pine is removing when it accesses the
mailspool in quick succession with procmail.  You may want to make sure
you're not running an old version of pine and that procmail is using at
least one kernel locking method in common with pine, but otherwise I
would probably ignore it until it causes a problem.

Philip Guenther

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