oleg@gryphon.COM (Oleg Kiselev) (07/20/89)
One of the recent MUSH "converts" has presented me with a complaint that MUSH
trashes his mailbox when there is more than 1000 new messages in it. I have
not had a chance to check that it really is a problem with MUSH (and not
filesystem out of space or something of the sort). Has anyone else
encountered this problem?
--
"No regrets, no apologies." -- Ronald Reagan
Oleg Kiselev ARPA: lcc.oleg@seas.ucla.edu, oleg@gryphon.COM
(213)337-5230 UUCP: [world]!{ucla-se|gryphon}!lcc!olegschaefer@ogccse.ogc.edu (Barton E. Schaefer) (07/20/89)
In article <17588@gryphon.COM> oleg@gryphon.COM (Oleg Kiselev) writes: } One of the recent MUSH "converts" has presented me with a complaint that MUSH } trashes his mailbox when there is more than 1000 new messages in it. I have } not had a chance to check that it really is a problem with MUSH (and not } filesystem out of space or something of the sort). Has anyone else } encountered this problem? The default configuration for mush is to handle a maximum of 1000 messages. If you need more, you can redefine the constant MAXMSGS in config.h and recompile. This limitation is mentioned in the man page, with a remark about politely asking your sysadmin to make the change. The static limitation on the number of messages is a recognized problem. However, a large number of functions depend on it for declaration of auto arrays, so changing to dynamic allocation is a major task. -- Bart Schaefer "And if you believe that, you'll believe anything." -- DangerMouse CSNET / Internet schaefer@cse.ogc.edu UUCP ...{sequent,tektronix,verdix}!ogccse!schaefer
argv%eureka@Sun.COM (Dan Heller) (07/20/89)
In article schaefer@ogccse.UUCP (Barton E. Schaefer) writes: > In article <17588@gryphon.COM> oleg@gryphon.COM (Oleg Kiselev) writes: > } One of the recent MUSH "converts" has presented me with a complaint that MUSH > } trashes his mailbox when there is more than 1000 new messages in it. I have > } not had a chance to check that it really is a problem with MUSH (and not > } filesystem out of space or something of the sort). Has anyone else > } encountered this problem? > The default configuration for mush is to handle a maximum of 1000 messages. This is all true, but it doesn't answer the question at hand. I have not had mush die or mangle a folder with more than 1000 messages. Mush makes maticulous checks that it doesn't. If the folder does have more than 1000 msgs in it, then it won't read them, but it won't lose them either. If mush would happen to core dump, it never updates or removes a folder. If you have a problem with having more than 1000 (MAXMSGS) messages in a folder and can recreate a situation where your folder gets mangled, then please send me info about it. (BTW, mush also checks for full filesystem errors as well) dan <island!argv@sun.com> ----- My postings reflect my opinion only -- not the opinion of any company.
alpope@token.Sun.COM (Alan Pope) (07/20/89)
In article <17588@gryphon.COM>, oleg@gryphon.COM (Oleg Kiselev) writes: > One of the recent MUSH "converts" has presented me with a complaint that MUSH > trashes his mailbox when there is more than 1000 new messages in it. I have > not had a chance to check that it really is a problem with MUSH (and not > filesystem out of space or something of the sort). Has anyone else > encountered this problem? Yes. But it wasn't my mailbox (not /usr/spool/mail/alpope), it occurred on a mail folder. I expect it is similar. There were about 1100-1200 messages in a mailbox. On open I got a message to the effect that it was going to ignore all of the messages past 1000, or something to that effect. I continued (though my initial reaction was to kill the mush process) to go through the mail folder. On exit after I had deleted and replied to several messages, it appeared that some messages were duplicated into the folder in a run, i.e., on exit the last 120 or so messages (say 800-920, since I had deleted some) appeared to be duplicated (as 921-1041). But (aha!), this folder was a news group and it is just possible that I saved the articles twice. There did not appear to be any missing (unless they were articles after the ones duplicated). I almost never save batches of news in quantities greater than 20 or 30 articles, so it struck me as likely that it was becuase I exceeded the 1000 limit, but I do not know for certain. Alan L. Pope alpope@sun.com
alpope@token.Sun.COM (Alan Pope) (07/20/89)
I forgot to mention that this was mush -t (mush tool rather than another form). I will attempt to recreate this! Alan L. Pope alpope@sun.com
pat@rwing.UUCP (Pat Myrto) (07/25/89)
In article <4666@freja.diku.dk>, oleg@gryphon.COM (Oleg Kiselev) writes: > One of the recent MUSH "converts" has presented me with a complaint that MUSH > trashes his mailbox when there is more than 1000 new messages in it. I don't know how the current revision level of Mush would behave, not having a huge mailbox to try it on, but when I had a huge mailbox with the 6.4 version, and ran Mush, I did get some error messages, so I just exited with `x' (exit, leave mailbox unchanged), and ran `dissect' on the mailbox. This broke it up into several files, based on who sent the message. I then used mush -f on each of the files where the sender indicated a reply would be needed. The remaining files were simply removed (the large number of messages were due to the completion messages from a downstream site after a news transfer). While this is no fix for Mush dealing with extremely large mailboxes, it could be called a work around, and is how I would normally handle them. It might be worth mentioning that /bin/mail will also choke on overly large mailboxes, so this is not a problem unique with mush, unless I totally misunderstood the posting. The dissect utility was posted some time back, I don't recall to which newsgroup. Hope this titbit will be of use to someone that must currently manipulate mboxes with over 1000 msgs in them... -- pat@rwing ...!nwnexus!mltco!camco!happym!\ (Pat Myrto), Seattle, WA ...!uunet!pilchuck!rwing!pat ...!uw-beaver!sumax!polari!/ WISDOM: "Travelling unarmed is like boating without a life jacket"