Subject: Re: junking mail

From: [email-masked] (David W. Tamkin)
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 1994 10:54:40 -0600 (CST)

Stephen confirmed Roman's assessment:

| > As for resource consumption /dev/null is
| >probably better than |.
| 
| Definitely.  Although stdout does not need to be opened anymore, the text
| does have to be saved somewhere (by sendmail).

OK; but how does Roman's own suggestion, namely

	{ LASTFOLDER=deleted HOST=exit }

compare for resource consumption?

Setting LASTFOLDER not only takes care of my previous objection, but it also
adds an opportunity for creativity.  A recipe that uses an incoming letter
to trigger a program and then junks the letter because it isn't needed can
do this, for example:

      :a # only if previous pipe succeeded
      { LASTFOLDER=done HOST=exit }

      :A: # in case pipe failed save letter to examine; maybe it was at fault
      failedpipes

On the other hand, a recipe that throws away mail from someone you'd like out
of your life can set LASTFOLDER=jerk (or something stronger).

| As for optimising away the open and writes to /dev/null, I'm not going to
| do that any time soon.  The system calls that deal with /dev/null are
| very cheap in most kernels.  It would only result in unnecessary bloat for
| the procmail binary.

Fair enough; procmail already has extra code to ignore a request for a local
lockfile on a save to /dev/null.

David W. Tamkin  P. O. Box 3284  Skokie IL  60076-6284
[email-masked]   MCI Mail: 426-1818   +1 312 714 5610