Re: Avoiding competing process (was Re: indexes)

My take on this tread is that Hypermail apperantly does not do any file locking. It should. I assume the files in question are:  

 subject.html
 index.html
 date.html
 author.html
 nnnn.html where nnnn is the next incremented article number.

Maybe a .hmlock file with the PID of the job. Sort of like mail locking works. Look at the code from sendmail-8.9.1/mail.local/mail.local.c. or pine4.05/imap/src/osdep/unix/flcksafe.c, or procmail.

Randall

On Wed, 7 Oct 1998, Tom von Alten wrote:

: Byron C. Darrah <bdarr_at_sse.FU.HAC.COM> wrote:
: > For example, what I do at my site (and I would not be surprised to learn
: > that a lot of other people do too) is direct incoming mail for an archive
: > to an mbox file instead of piping it to hypermail. Then, at periodic
: > intervals a cron job runs a Makefile that runs hypermail if and only
: > if there are any new messages to be added to the archive.
: >
: > Of course, you would set the cron job's period to something greater than
: > the amount of time it takes for your computer to update the hypermail
: > archive to gurantee that two hypermail processes wont compete.
:
: Good idea.
:
: We have a wrapper script that stores the incoming message and calls
: hypermail. It uses a "ln" command to provide a semaphore and force
: multiple calls to hypermail to queue up if needed.
:
: Having the message stored means that various error conditions can be
: recovered from if needed -- the wrapper sends the message on to the
: sysadmin if it or hypermail has a problem.
Received on Wed 07 Oct 1998 09:32:33 PM GMT