U6000 mail problems

[George Peavy]

I'm in the process of trying to install rn and Cnews on a Unisys 6000/51 
running AT&T Unix sys V, rel 3.0, and having problems on both when the 
make processes report a syntax error in one of the c source files.

In the meantime, my distribution copy of 'mail' which has been renamed 'lmail'
with my installation of smail 2.5 has been acting mysteriously, hanging
up (and not delivering mail or refusing to read waiting mail) when invoked.
What's happening is that mail (sometimes smail or lmail) invokes a process
which does a "sh -c /bin/smail fred", which, in turn, invokes 
"/bin/smail fred", which, in turn invodes "sh -c /bin/smail/fred", ad
nauseum.  Eventually, the whole thing times out.

Additionally, I'm finding lots of "fred.lock" files in /usr/mail containing
a process id number, getting there when presumably /etc/profile checks for 
mail at login time.

This has been happening only since I tried to install Cnews, thus it appears
that the Cnews installation process may have changed something, possibly
an owner or a permission, but as far as I can tell, I can't find anything
amiss in that area.  Also, I'm not experienced enough as a C programmer to
try hacking at source code, so the sources I'm working with are as I got
them originally.

Can any one give me some useful feedback?

Thanks.

George Peavy

-- 
George Peavy

(george at wciu.edu)