nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) (07/11/90)
Also, you should bear in mind, in trying to understand this problem, that /usr/ucb/mail doesn't do any file write operations at all in order -- it just reads the /usr/spool/mail/xxx file and prints out parts of it as needed. There are a number of technical reasons why this is a terrible idea, but it tends to be a lot faster ESPECIALLY when, as is usually the case, /usr/spool/mail is on the local disk but ~/.MESSAGES is on a file server somewhere...