Cmail - check to see who's read their mail - UNIX
Tom Christiansen
tchrist at convex.COM
Tue Oct 24 23:45:49 AEST 1989
In article <4006 at helios.ee.lbl.gov>,
leres at helios.ee.lbl.gov (Craig Leres) writes:
>Note that if a user is logged in and uses biff (or sysline), you can't
>really tell when mail was last read since biff reads new messages as
>they arrive. This is particuarly a problem if the person stays logged
>into a workstation 24 hours a day...
Only if your vendor hasn't fixed biff(1) to save the st_atime from when
it stats the file and restore it with utimes(2) after you're done reading.
Once this is done, your shell can do this on login:
if ($st_size) {
printf "You have %s mail.\n", $st_atime > $st_mtime ? "old" : "new";
}
oops, that was in perl not C :-) (i just wrote the perl translation
to cmail and posted it to alt.sources) you see what i mean though.
--tom
Tom Christiansen {uunet,uiucdcs,sun}!convex!tchrist
Convex Computer Corporation tchrist at convex.COM
"EMACS belongs in <sys/errno.h>: Editor too big!"
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