cball@ishmael.UUCP (10/20/87)
I just ran into a problem installing smail for the first time(surprise:-). It seemed to work correctly, but several big chunks of the database were inaccessible. The problem was that several entries in our pathalias database contain uppercase characters. Smail flattens ascii characters to lower case in its binary search algorithm, so it made the "wrong" decision on the output of a vanilla sort. The fix is to fold uppercase letters to lower case when sorting (sort -f) the pathalias database output. This is an interface problem, not a bug in either smail or pathalias. Nonetheless, it might be worth mentioning in the documentation for one or the other. Charles Ball cball@inmet.com Intermetrics, Inc.
cball@ishmael.UUCP (10/21/87)
Whoops. This problem is well documented in the smail man pages as at least one person was kind enough to inform me(as is a bug in sort -f). I was foolish enough to just read the installation notes. Never mind, Charles