hucka@CAEN.ENGIN.UMICH.EDU (Michael Hucka) (07/29/87)
I'm experiencing a strange problem on our net of Apollos here
and I was wondering if anyone might be able to offer some help in tracking
down a solution. The situation is this: under the Bourne shell (/bin/sh)
and, in some instances, even the c-shell, some programs (specifically
sendmail) apparently cannot properly resolve symbolic links. It is most
easily demonstrated here by trying to mail a message from a Bourne shell
using /usr/ucb/mail: if /usr is actually a link to $(systype)/usr
B$ cd //xenon
B$ ls -lagd usr
lrwxrwxrwx 1 <none> <none> 14 Jul 29 03:46 usr -> $(systype)/usr
then trying to mail something produces the error
cannot open /usr/lib/sendmail.cf: Invalid argument
The failure apparently occurs during the fopen of /usr/lib/sendmail.cf. Now,
if I change the /usr link to remove the "systype" variable,
$ /com/crl usr "//xenon/bsd4.2/usr" -r
$ /bin/ls -lagd usr
lrwxrwxrwx 1 <none> <none> 18 Jul 29 04:02 usr -> //xenon/bsd4.2/usr
the error doesn't occur (but the mail doesn't get anywhere either).
Now, I know about the documented bug that "Names cannot be resolved correctly
if they must resolve through two or more layers of symbolic links created
via ln(1)." These links were created with /com/crl, however, and everything
works fine as is from a straight /bin/csh shell. I verified that the "systype"
variable is set (even tried it in upper and lower case!) but this produced no
change. The same phenomenon occurs if I try to send mail from within Gnu Emacs.
We're running 9.5. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be
causing this? (Or better yet, a solution?)
Mike Hucka (hucka@caen.engin.umich.edu)
Computer Aided Engineering Network
University of Michigan