Subject: Re: Procmail question

From: Jeremy Mathers <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 15:43:08 -0600

>"John P. Speno" <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>I've installed procmail as sendmail's local delivery agent, and noticed
>>something I don't like. A 'ps' shows the sender and recipients, and I was
>>wondering if there is a way for procmail to hide that information. Thanks.

>The recipient cannot be hidden.  The sender can be hidden, if you omit
>the 'f' flag from the sendmail Mlocal definition, and add the flag
>that causes sendmail to create the From_ line.

I think he was talking about hacking the argv array so that it doesn't
show up on PS.  It doesn't sound like it would be too hard to do - just
copy argv to a local variable (say Argv) and set argv[1] = 0.  Then, of
course, you have to globally search/replace the sources.  I've done this
in some of my programs.

Doing all this to procmail is left as an exercise for the reader...

---

From: [email-masked] (Stephen R. van den Berg)
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 1995 16:36:03 +0100

>course, you have to globally search/replace the sources.  I've done this

Sure, you could do that, but:
1. POSIX does not allow writing to argv[], it only allows writing to argv[][]
   (however strange that may seem).
2. It doesn't work on all systems, some systems make a copy of the kernel
   data structures for the the program, and since the ps program looks at the
   kernel data, there is little use in having the program munge his private
   copy.
3. The solution would (emphasis on would :-) be to make procmail support SMTP,
   so that the recipient or sender does not have to be put on the command line.

-- 
Sincerely,                                  [email-masked]
           Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless).

"Good moaning!"