David Stone <dstone(_at_)chem(_dot_)utoronto(_dot_)ca> writes:
Philip Guenther wrote:
If you have any hardcoded paths to binaries (formail, cat, sed, etc)
then you should fix them to *not* be absolute path. The PATH variable
is there for a reason and this is one of them. If PATH is correctly,
then you should almost never need an absolute path for binaries. If PATH
is being set at the top of the rcfiles then you should _probably_ make
sure it only adds paths to the default built-in to the procmail binary.
[1] How do you only ADD to the PATH variable instead of replacing it?
Incorporate $PATH into the value you're setting it to. For example,
if you wanted to add /usr/local/unsupported/bin to the end of the path,
you would write:
PATH = $PATH:/usr/local/unsupported/bin
[2] I've seen many filters with hardcoded formail & sendmail paths.
If this isn't a good idea, why did anyone start doing it in the
first place? (I think this was asked a week or so ago, but no-one
answered it then either!)
The one reasonable justification I've heard for hardcoding paths is that
an old and/or broken version of a program (usually formail) exists in
the standard path, but they don't want to add to the path the directory
containing the newer version for some reason (it has broken versions of
other programs, or is NFS mounted from an unreliable server). All the
other explanations I can remember hearing have been bogus.
Philip Guenther