Re: Lockfile / Write error whilst testing

On Sat, 2012-08-25 at 09:16 -0500, Robert Bonomi wrote:
{snip}

> >
> > What have I messed up?
> 
> wrong thing, wrong place.  <wry grin>
> 
> MAILDIR is where your 'system' inbox is to be found (typically '/var/mail',
> unless your're playing advanced games)  (DEFAULT, if not expliitly set,
> is usually, for mbox deliver, $MAILDIR/$USER)
> 
> DEFAULT is the path (for a -file-, if you're using 'mbox' type delivery)
> where mail is delivered if you fall off the end of .procmailrc.
> 
> It is *NOT* 'prefixed' to explicit delivery file names in the action
> 
> "As specified", procmail will try to deliver to $HOME (or possibly the
> current working directory in testbed runs), and subdirectories -under-
> $HOME  the action is 'dir/file'.
> 
> What you -probably- want to do is declare a variable, say 'DESTDIR'
> that is absolute path to the directory where everything goes -- per
> your example, it would be 'DESTDIR=$HOME/Proctest/Outfiles', and then
> use '$DESTDIR/Mlist/file', for example, in the delivery action.

Hello and thanks for helping!

The $DESTDIR trick certainly works, but I am a little confused. In Sean
B Straw's example sandbox
(http://www.professional.org/procmail/sandbox.html) he states in the
comments:
# IMPORTANT: this dir is different from where your regular procmailrc
# would deliver messages.  Your recipes should always avoid delivering to
# hard-coded paths - define directories using variables so that the paths
# can be changed external to the script.
MAILDIR=$HOME/.procmail/sandbox

This is why I set : MAILDIR=$HOME/Proctest in my sandbox.rc

I agree that DEFAULT should not really be relevant in this case. In
Sean's example sandbox he redefines DEFAULT to /dev/null because he is
not interested in messages that pass through the filters. In my case I
wanted to set it just so that I could see if something was happening (I
have since set it to /dev/null too).

Prior to my system crash I had often used Sean's sandbox for testing new
recipes. I never remember having to explicitly declare the delivery
destination before.

I am sure I have done something wrong - I just can't see it. In the
meantime I will continue to use the $DESTDIR trick in the recipes I am
testing.

Thanks again.

Mark