Re: Detecting pine in procmail

Patrick Rogers wrote,

R> I'm a new procmail user and I have a unique problem.  I use procmail to
R> filter mail from certain users and forward it to my pager.  When I am
R> reading my mail with another application I would rather not have procmail
R> process my pagerNames.rc file, since my local mail reader will beeb.
R> Usually I read my mail with pine, so essentially I want a procmail recipe
R> that will detect wether or not pine is running, and if not process my
R> pagerNames recipes.  Is this possible?  I realize it is out of the scope
R> of what a mail filter should do, but it would be very useful.

Era Eriksson has posted a reply, and mine is similar.  The question, though,
is this: if an incoming message normally should go through pagerNames.rc,
but you have Pine running, should procmail

(a) wait until you exit Pine, or
(b) skip pagerNames.rc and move on?

So, first I agree with Era about a semaphore file (is that the right term?),
but rather than test && touch, I'd recommend lockfile for it, partly because
you could get a race condition where a beep could be on the way while you're
entering Pine, and because in case (a) it integrates very easily into your
main rcfile.  Here's my modification of Era's script:

#!/bin/sh
pinelock=$HOME/.pine-running
if lockfile -! -r0 $pinelock; then
  echo 'Oops, there already seems to be a copy of Pine running' >&2
  echo "Issue the command rm -rf $pinelock if this is not true." >&2
  exit 1
fi
trap 'rm -f $pinelock' 1 2 3 15
/usr/local/bin/pine "$@"
rm -f $pinelock

And as he said,

E> You may have to change your PATH in your login files to make your
E> personal $HOME/bin version take precedence over the real pine.

E> Now you can change your .procmailrc where it says

E>     INCLUDERC=pagerNames.rc

E> to instead say

E>     :0
E>     * ! ?? test -f $HOME/.pine-running
E>     { INCLUDERC=pagerNames.rc }

Just one question mark there, Era.

OK ... but since we're using lockfile, it goes like this:

To make procmail wait until you exit Pine before beeping,

      :0
      * conditions for determing if you try to page at all
      {
        LOCKFILE=$HOME/.pine-running
        INCLUDERC=pagerNames.rc
        LOCKFILE # in case of fall-through
      }

To make procmail skip the INCLUDERC if you're running Pine,

      :0
      * conditions for determining if you try to page at all
      * ! ? lockfile -r0 $HOME/.pine-running
      { INCLUDERC=pagerNames.rc }