Re: folders which are numerical names

>if your folder is a primary directly under $MAILPATH/ it works fine, as a
>pure numeric
>
>so folder +2021 is fine -and I do this for archives by year.
>
>if your folder is sub-folder under another folder like +sent/2021 it only
>kind-of works. Any function which performs scan functions looks to pure
>numeric objects as files, and barfs on the directory. So I work around it
>by having archives like sent/y2021 and it works fine.

The exact case is that there isn't a problem as long as something that
is a folder doesn't contain a non-file who's name consists of all decimal
digits.  So in theory 'scan +$MAILPATH' probably won't work so well (but
maybe that's not that useful in practice).

>the other path out here is to do folder +2021/sent and subfolder sent
>inside the archive year which works fine.
>
>I just wondered if a stat() on the object to skip (sub)folders in contexts
>which demand files would work? Might be a pain to implement without
>unwanted side-effects.

This comes up occasionaly, most recently here:

https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2023-03/msg00000.html

Unfortunately, there are no good answers.  stat()ing every possible
message would be very expensive.  dirent->d_type is not always reliable
(and it's not easy to figure out when it will be reliable).  The consensus
in the past has been "don't do that".  I am open to suggestions of course.

--Ken