[hacknews] mail

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (08/22/84)

Hastily fixed a long-known bug in mail:  the code which waited for a
subprocess to complete was buggy and could malfunction if the process
had unexpected children.  Unexpected children can occur as a result of
the way the shell does pipelines.  I'd known about this problem for
quite a while, and had it on the low-priority-fixes list, but the new
shell provoked the problem on a grand scale.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (09/26/84)

Mail(1) has been modified very slightly to guard against a possible
security hole:  a partial breach of security might have been possible
if mail(1) ran setgroupid-root (which it doesn't here).  Mail now copes
properly with this case.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (04/17/85)

It used to be impossible to get a core dump from a misbehaving mail(1),
because it caught *all* signals.  This was stupid.  It has been changed
to catch only the reasonably-appropriate ones.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/03/85)

A slightly-improved version of expand(3) is now installed in mail(1),
making it possible to say things like "s $h/foobar" and have the $h
expanded properly.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry