Ah, the joys of sheer stupidity.
I left off the $ in front of MAILDIR when using it as part of an assignment to
DEFAULT in my testing configuration file. While a typo may not be considered
worthy of such a lowly estimation, the deliberate unsetting of LOGFILE at the
end of the rc is certainly, and so the repeated death throes of lockfile fell
like the proverbial tree in the proverbial unoccupied forest.
LOCKSLEEP is 8 seconds, and apparantly procmail calls lockfile with the number
of tries set to 8, so 8 seconds times (8 tries minus one try with no leading
sleep) gives 56 seconds, which is why 8 messages took almost 8 minutes to be
processed.
The only saving grace was that this was not happening in the production
environment.
Despite my potential lack of grounds to complain, I will nonetheless note that
even though lockfile's man page claims that it possesses less than one bug, I
consider it to have a couple of design flaws, since it cannot determine that
it is attempting to create a lockfile in a non-existent directory, and it
allows that failure to affect its data space as indicated by the following
samples of output:
SAMPLE 1
procmail: [30549] Tue Apr 1 02:45:20 2003
procmail: Locking "MAILDIR/default.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "MAILDIR/_VdH+_2Wi-.nixon.xkey.com"
procmail: [30549] Tue Apr 1 02:45:28 2003
procmail: Locking "MAILDIR/default.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "MAILDIR/_VdH%_2Wi-.nixon.xkey.com"
procmail: [30549] Tue Apr 1 02:45:36 2003
procmail: Locking "MAILDIR/default.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "MAILDIR/_VdH.Q3Wi-.nixon.xkey.com"
procmail: [30549] Tue Apr 1 02:45:44 2003
procmail: Locking "MAILDIR/default.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "MAILDIR/_VdH,Q3Wi-.nixon.xkey.com"
procmail: [30549] Tue Apr 1 02:45:52 2003
procmail: Locking "MAILDIR/default.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "MAILDIR/_VdH+Q3Wi-.nixon.xkey.com"
procmail: [30549] Tue Apr 1 02:46:00 2003
procmail: Locking "MAILDIR/default.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "MAILDIR/_VdH%Q3Wi-.nixon.xkey.com"
procmail: [30549] Tue Apr 1 02:46:08 2003
procmail: Locking "MAILDIR/default.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "MAILDIR/_VdH.w3Wi-.nixon.xkey.com"
procmail: [30549] Tue Apr 1 02:46:16 2003
procmail: Locking "MAILDIR/default.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "MAILDIR/_VdH,w3Wi-.nixon.xkey.com"
procmail: Lock failure on "MAILDIR/default.lock"
SAMPLE 2 (another occasion where I mis-specified a lockfile)
ls: Mail/alltimefavorites.com: No such file or directory
procmail: Terminating prematurely whilst waiting for lockfile
"(c@(c(_at_)timefavorites(_dot_)com(_dot_)lock"
From Celebration(_at_)Ovation-Entertainment(_dot_)com Wed Jan 01 19:37:22 2003
Folder: **Bounced** 1308
ls: Mail/alltimefavorites.com: No such file or directory
procmail: Terminating prematurely whilst waiting for lockfile
"(c@(c(_at_)timefavorites(_dot_)com(_dot_)lock"
From Celebration(_at_)Ovation-Entertainment(_dot_)com Wed Jan 01 19:37:22 2003
Folder: **Bounced** 1308
Jeff
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