mailwatch script wanted

[John Collins]

In article <2509 at sun.uucp> guy at sun.uucp (Guy Harris) writes:
>....................  (Besides, they
>should have added a flag which tells "mail" to *print* a message instead of
>returning an exit status, or to return one of *three* exit statuses.  That
>way, you can distinguish "You have mail (because you leave stuff around in
>your mailbox until you've responded to it)" from "You have mail (because
>some mail arrived since the last time you looked at your mailbox).")	>

I agree - and at the same time why not tidy up all the commands which return
the same exit status whatever happened to return different codes for different
errors so that other programs can use standard utilities can work out what
went wrong without deciphering stderr (when they use stderr!!).

Mind you the Bourne shell is a bit vague about returning exit codes in a
pipeline - so there are limits.


-- 
John M Collins		....mcvax!ist!inset!jmc
Phone:	+44 727 57267
Snail Mail: 47 Cedarwood Drive, St Albans, Herts, AL4 0DN, England.