Re: How to control the email file name procmail produces

At 03:25 2011-01-27, Yue Wu wrote:
>>>it works fine in *nix. But someday when I want to move the dirs onto a
>>>fat32 filesystem, I failed and I found the reason is that the files
>>>name has some inlegal characters, maybe : or ,?

It's the colon, which is used as a drive letter separator in windows.

>>Why in the name of all that is sensible would you ever want to move them
>>to FAT32? Is it 2002 again and I missed it?

2002?  Try 1994.

>I can't live without windows, I need fat32 for data sharing between
>windows and BSD.

What's wrong with SMBFS?  Leave the files on their intended hosts, 
access them over a net.  If you're using one box to dual boot two OS, 
you might consider changing to using a VM configuration - use one 
host (I'd suggest the *NIX one <g>) as the host OS, which the machine 
boots into, and run the other as a VM within that.  That's a 
discussion for a different forum though.

>>These filenames are the standard format for maildir files, and the name
>>is not generated by procmail.
>
>Hmm, I thought it's procmail's task to make the file, so it's made by
>fetchmail?

Procmail creates the file, IIRC, but the naming convention is used by 
MUAs and IMAP, etc.

I won't pretend to understand why you need to _host_ these files on a 
windows platform, but if you just need access to them, why not use 
SMBFS and share them from their current *nix host?

If you need to store them on a windows box, but won't really be using 
any tools to access them (such as an IMAP daemon), then why not write 
a shell script to rename them while you're migrating the files.  If 
you have some idea of how you'd rather they be named, this should be 
straightforward for you.

HOW are you accessing the files once they're on the windows host?

Have you ever looked into cygwin?  At a shell from within windows, I can:

touch 1286938757.42024_0.fbsd.t60.cpu:2,S

and the file shows up with that name within the cygwin shell, but 
outside of it, it has the colon replaced with a ?:

         1286938757.42024_0.fbsd.t60.cpu?2,S

I can access that file from within a console, though some programs 
still don't like the filename if invoked from a console.  Turns out, 
the '?' is what is shown in a console, but it's really a front for a 
unicode character.  You can fina and open the file from within a 
file..open browse within a windows app.

So, if you can't live without windows, I humbly suggest that you 
can't live without cygwin.

---
  Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

  Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
  Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.