2.1.46 weird creat problem

Jonathan Corbet (corbet@stout.atd.ucar.edu)
Wed, 23 Jul 1997 14:47:34 -0600

When I went from 2.1.42 to 2.1.46, MH (the one true mail system) stopped
working for me. It seems that I am no longer able to "inc" my mail out of
the mail spool, which is a (NFS-mounted) Solaris-served, t-bit mail
directory. Strace shows the following happening:

[...]
stat("/var/spool/mail/,LCK.a01595", 0xbfffdea8) =
-1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
unlink("/var/spool/mail/,LCK.a01595") =
-1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
creat("/var/spool/mail/,LCK.a01595", 0400) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
[...]

The interesting thing is that, after this sequence of events, the funky LCK
file it wants to create does, in fact exist. Since the ENOENT errors above
make it clear that the did not exist before, I conclude that the creat()
worked, but then returned an incorrect error code.

Anybody else seen anything like this? Like I said, 2.1.42 didn't do this
to me...

Thanks,
jon

Jonathan Corbet
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Atmospheric Technology Division
corbet@atd.ucar.edu http://www.atd.ucar.edu/rdp/jmc.html