Re: Anybody working on removing sendmail from base?

[Chris Pressey <cpressey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 22:31:14 -0700
Timothy Cava <timothy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hiten Pandya wrote:
> >     Timothy,
> > 
> >     Shouldn't this be something that the shell should do?
> > 
> >     Regards,
> 
> Perhaps. FreeBSD doesn't take that approach, however, hence my
> patch.

I think it does - at least, my shell (/bin/tcsh) does.  Whenever I get
mail, then the next time I get a shell prompt, I get the message "You
have new mail" above it.  (I run qmail but I have it deliver to mbox)

> I suppose I can make login not check, and do it with the
> shell?

There must be a way.  Tim mentioned a precmd alias for tcsh - that's
probably a good lead.

But - what I don't like about this setup is that it's synchronous with
displaying a new prompt.  If I get new mail, but leave my tcsh prompt
untouched for an hour, I won't see the message for an hour.  :(

Perhaps in the days before X11 and screen when one instance of the shell
was in more or less constant use, this was marginally acceptable... but
surely in an asynchronous-friendly OS like DragonFlyBSD there should be
a way to be notified right when it happens...?  It can't be too hard to
have a background process write to the terminal - kind of messy, though.

-Chris