[562] in linux-net channel archive
Linux popper BUG
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (dsamperi@soho.ios.com)
Thu Jun 22 15:03:45 1995
From: dsamperi@soho.ios.com
To: linux-admin@vger.rutgers.edu, linux-net@vger.rutgers.edu
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 1995 12:48:05 -0400 (EDT)
I sent this bug report while I was not on the linux-admin/linux-net
mailing lists, so I'm not sure it was circulated...
There seems to be a bug in popper under Linux (UCB Pop version 2.1.3-R3,
file called "qpopper")
when it is used to send mail via the XTND XMIT extended command. When the
user's mailbox (/usr/spool/mail/user) is empty to begin with sending
mail works fine (actually sendmail does the sending as a forked
process of popper).
On the other hand, when there are messages in the user's mailbox at the
time that popper is used to send a new message the message is correctly
appended, but the mailbox is corrupted by having about 500 NULL's written
to the beginning of the file. Deleting these NULL's fixes the mailbox,
but this is obviously not a reasonable solution.
I tried to study the problem more carefully by running sendmail manually
on the temporary xmit file that popper creates (in debug mode), but this
did not result in a corrupted mailbox (that is, the mail was delivered
fine). My guess is that there is some subtle problem with the way forked
processes inherit IO handles.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Dominick
--
Dominick Samperi
Email: dsamperi@soho.ios.com
Voice: (212) 488-9534
