Re: [PATCH] MAILPATH stopped working after update to Bash 4.0

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 10/26/2009 04:16 AM, Chet Ramey wrote:
> Evgeniy Dushistov wrote:
> > On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 04:11:23PM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
> > > Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> > > > I have:
> > > >
> > > >    MAILPATH="/home/me/.maildir/new?You have new mail."
> > > >    MAILCHECK=60
> > > >
> > > > Bash 3.2 was correctly telling me about new mail arriving.  However,
> > > > after I updated to Bash 4.0, I constantly get a "You have new mail."
> > > > message every minute even though I actually don't have new mail.
> > > > [...]
> > > There was a small change made to the mail file initialization code, to
> > > keep from dropping the first "new mail" notification.  [...]
> > >
> > > I don't use a maildir-aware mail program, but you can debug this by
> > > setting a breakpoint in mailcheck.c:check_mail().
> >
> > I recently faced with the same problem, when package manager update
> > my bash from 3.x to 4.x.
> > I compared mailcheck.c from 3.2 and 4.0, and see only logic difference
> > in add_mail_file. When it function handle new file, it not read it's
> > date information as it was in 3.x, but set it to zero,
>
> The change to use init_mail_file was intentional, but it doesn't set
> the mod time and access time to 0.  It initializes a mailpath entry,
> but doesn't call mailstat on the file until it's actually checking mail.
> Changing it back to call update_mail_file defeats the purpose of the
> change, which is to avoid calling mailstat and reading a potentially
> very large maildir until MAILCHECK is set and we need to.

It also seems to defeat the purpose of getting informed about new mail :P