[comp.unix.aix] Mail notification under csh on R6000?

johnson@horta.rice.edu (Bruce Johnson) (04/01/91)

While mail notification seems to work fine under ksh, we have
been unable to get it to work under csh, which many of our
users use as their login shell.  Putting the environmental
variable MAIL to, e.g., "5 /usr/spool/mail/username" as described
in the "man pages" for csh doesn't seem to accomplish much.  Is
this a FAQ?

Bruce Johnson
Dept Chem, Rice Univ

ejbehr@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Eric Behr) (04/01/91)

johnson@horta.rice.edu (Bruce Johnson) writes:
>While mail notification seems to work fine under ksh, we have
>been unable to get it to work under csh, which many of our
>users use as their login shell.  Putting the environmental
>variable MAIL to, e.g., "5 /usr/spool/mail/username" as described
>in the "man pages" for csh doesn't seem to accomplish much.  Is
>this a FAQ?
>
Sure is for me - most replies I received were "MAIL should do the trick".
Our comsat notifies user X when user Y's mail arrives, and nothing (biff,
MAIL) seems to do the "You-have-mail-on-login-trick". Did IBM, perchance,
screw up in a major way ??? 8-()    Please summarize if you get a working
fix. Thanks!     

-- 
Eric Behr, Illinois State University, Mathematics Department
Internet: ejbehr@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu    Bitnet: ebehr@ilstu

freese@dalvm41b.vnet.ibm.com ("Bradley T. Freese") (05/15/91)

johnson@horta.rice.edu (Bruce Johnson) writes:

> While mail notification seems to work fine under ksh, we have
> been unable to get it to work under csh, which many of our
> users use as their login shell.  Putting the environmental
> variable MAIL to, e.g., "5 /usr/spool/mail/username" as described
> in the "man pages" for csh doesn't seem to accomplish much.  Is
> this a FAQ?

From the csh prompt, try:
|%set mail = (5 /usr/spool/mail/username)

This works for me.  Notice that "mail" is lowercase, in contrast to
the bourne variable "MAIL".