interesting mail problem

[Chip Salzenberg]

According to chip at vector.UUCP (Chip Rosenthal):
>Chapter three of the continuing saga...
>One thing I did was write a quick /bin/mail which is similar to the
>svbinmail.c distributed with smail 2.5, but simpler.  The idea is that
>"/bin/mail" immediately execs either "/bin/smail" or "/usr/bin/mail", as
>appropriate.

Smail will accept a header at the front of a message, whereas /usr/bin/mail
will not, ever.  So if you invoke Smail directly, you'd better be sure the
beginning of the message doesn't look like a mail header.

>I see a couple of approaches:
>(1)  Throw away /bin/mail and let cron work through SCO's /usr/bin/mail.
>     A giant step backwards.

How is this a giant step backwards?

You can't change the behavior of a program as commonly used as /usr/bin/mail
without expecting breakage.  I say:  It's not great, but it's good enough.
Leave /usr/bin/mail.
-- 
Chip Salzenberg             <chip at ateng.com> or <uunet!ateng!chip>
A T Engineering             Me?  Speak for my company?  Surely you jest!
	  "It's no good.  They're tapping the lines."