Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 02:10:49 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Toomas Tamm <toomas@chem.helsinki.fi> Cc: bugs@freebsd.org, toomas@neon.pc.helsinki.fi, paul@vix.com, jtc@netbsd.org Subject: Re: Mail dumps core if USER not set Message-ID: <6267.843037849@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 18 Sep 1996 09:23:58 %2B0300." <323F957E.18BA2A84@chem.helsinki.fi>
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> The RedHat Linux (Rembrandt 3.0.3) appears to use BSD mail (Mail?) > program as the command-line mail user agent. However since Linux is > sysV'ish, there are situations where the USER environment variable > is not set. One of these is when a script is run by cron (vixie cron > under this Linux). > > When the USER is not set, the mail program dumps core, instead of > producing an intelligent error message. This was not trivial to > figure out, since under a login shell, USER is always set properly. > It can be easily verified, however, by unset'ing USER under a login > shell. I'm afraid this must be more of a problem with Linux's syncronization with the BSD tools - this has been fixed since 4.4L1 and possibly well before, I don't have sources going back that far to check. The one and only call to get the value of $USER checks properly for a NULL return (in which case it returns getname(getuid())), and just to make absolutely positively sure, I checked with USER unset and it worked just fine. I suspect that people's unwillingness to accept ownership of this bug is strongly correlated with the fact that it does not actually, in fact, exist with BSD's Mail program. Jordan
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