Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2002 13:22:10 +0200 From: Marc Olzheim <marcolz@ilse.nl> To: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: marcolz@stack.nl Subject: /bin/sh, $MAIL and login.conf Message-ID: <20020705132210.A20062@ilse.nl>
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Hi. I was wondering why /etc/login.conf makes the login shell for root check for mail in /var/mail/root. Most systems I use have /var/mail nfs-mounted from a central mailserver. When there are networking problems and thus all operations on /var/mail keep 'hanging', I would like to be able to login as root on console and fix it. With the default login.conf, this is not possible though, since one of the first things /bin/sh does, is check $MAIL for new mail. So I have three questions: 1) Am I the only one with this kind of problem ? 2) Is there (going to be) an 'unsetenv' possibility in login.conf, so that I can still use 'default' for all classes and just unsetenv MAIL for sysadmins and root ? 3) Why does /bin/sh in non-interactive mode _also_ check $MAIL ? If an NFS mounted filesystem is non-responsive, all crons that use /bin/sh will keep hangig until the filesystem responds. If the problem remains long enough, the machine will simply run out of memory and/or processes because of all the hanging /bin/sh's... Does anybody have a good reason why it should behave like this ? Marc To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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