From owner-freebsd-bugs  Wed Sep 18 02:11:10 1996
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To: Toomas Tamm <toomas@chem.helsinki.fi>
cc: bugs@freebsd.org, toomas@neon.pc.helsinki.fi, paul@vix.com, jtc@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: Mail dumps core if USER not set 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 18 Sep 1996 09:23:58 +0300."
             <323F957E.18BA2A84@chem.helsinki.fi> 
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 02:10:49 -0700
Message-ID: <6267.843037849@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> The RedHat Linux (Rembrandt 3.0.3) appears to use BSD mail (Mail?)
> program as the command-line mail user agent. However since Linux is
> sysV'ish, there are situations where the USER environment variable
> is not set. One of these is when a script is run by cron (vixie cron
> under this Linux). 
> 
> When the USER is not set, the mail program dumps core, instead of
> producing an intelligent error message. This was not trivial to
> figure out, since under a login shell, USER is always set properly.
> It can be easily verified, however, by unset'ing USER under a login
> shell.

I'm afraid this must be more of a problem with Linux's syncronization
with the BSD tools - this has been fixed since 4.4L1 and possibly well
before, I don't have sources going back that far to check.  The one
and only call to get the value of $USER checks properly for a NULL
return (in which case it returns getname(getuid())), and just to make
absolutely positively sure, I checked with USER unset and it worked
just fine.

I suspect that people's unwillingness to accept ownership of this bug
is strongly correlated with the fact that it does not actually, in
fact, exist with BSD's Mail program.

						Jordan