Is there a way to test for a plain file's existence with procmail internals?
I can't help but feel that there should be through the lockfiles -
something equivalent to the command-line
lockfile -0 -r0 plainfile
which returns 0 (true) if it could lock the file - hence the file didn't
already exist - and non-zero if it could not. Those options say don't
wait if you can't get a lock, and don't retry.
But I don't think there are sufficient options with the in-procmail
locking to do that (I can't think of a way to say "don't retry, and
fail if you can't get a lock").
Failing that, on a system where /bin/test is a shell script, what would you
folks recommend as a small, cheap-to-run fork that (1) can take a filename as
a positional parameter [so that there's no need to fork a shell to handle
"<"], (2) will exit with an error if the file doesn't exist. and (3) will not
read the whole blasted file if it does exist and is long. The best I can
think of is head -0.
The above lockfile command should be reasonably lightweight!
Cheers,
Martin
--
Martin McCarthy /</ http://procmail.non-prophet.org
`Procmail Companion' \>\
Addison Wesley /</ PGP key available
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