whm.arizona@Rand-Relay (03/30/83)
We encountered a mysterious problem with using aliases to pipes in delivermail. Our current mail system is the mmdf/delivermail hybrid that the CSNET people have distributed in a rather cavalier fashion. We were attempting to use an alias: foo: "|foo" when we tried mailing to foo, there were no problems. When mailing to foo@arizona (forcing the mail through the mmdf system), delivermail would get the "Service Unavailable" error. The shell was returning a status of 1 and not executing the program. delivermail uses the Cshell for pipe aliases. I tried using the Bourne shell instead of the Cshell (using a -c rather than a -fc argument) and it worked. Does anybody know (perhaps Eric@Berkeley could speak) why /bin/csh is used in delivermail instead of /bin/sh? We've changed it locally and haven't had any problems.