response 101 of 118:

Feb 24 02:52 UTC 2007

My problem with Sindi's requests are that she has absolutely no understanding
of the technology.  None.  It's frankly a bother to respond back to her time
and again when she says the same sophmoric thing over and over again.

response 103 of 118:

Feb 24 05:16 UTC 2007

I looked at the proposed script and tried to figure out how it worked.
Instead of the above, if the user is running the script from their own
directory, would `whoami` produce their login?  If so:
cat ~keesan/procmailrc.sample | sed -e /keesan/`whoami`/ > .procmailrc
cat ~keesan/.forward > .forward

This would replace these two files if they already existed.  How do I append
to them instead?

Does anyone brave want to test the above from their own directory?
(I forget just what I named my most recent sample .procmailrc and there may
be several of different names).  I am sending anything with three or more spam
points to /dev/null, I think, but it could be to a spam folder instead.
Do NOT look at my actual .procmailrc, which is a game I am playing with the
spammers.

response 105 of 118:

Feb 24 18:06 UTC 2007

  A couple of pointers:
 
    1)  almost everybody (everybody?) will have the $USER environment
        variable set by login, so you probably won't have to ask the
        user for their login specifically, just use $USER.  If you 
        don't want to use the USER variable there are other ways,
        e.g. touch a test file in /tmp and look at the ownership for it,
        then remove it afterwards..  Or use `who am i`
 
    2)  when used with the "-i" flag sed will do an in-place edit on
        a file.  Or, skip the copy phase and use sed to do it, e.g.
 
        # check for existing .forward and back it up before proceeding
        [ -f ~/.forward ] && mv ~/.forward ~/.forward.$$
        # copy keesan's .forward but change instances of keesan to $USER
        sed "s/keesan/${USER}" ~keesan/.forward > ~/.forward

  Those are rough suggestions.  And they won't work (as is) for anyone
  who uses the Bourne shell (/bin/sh) if it really is a Bourne shell
  (I haven't tested on OpenBSD to see if it's an "improved" Bourne shell
  that understands stuff like "~keesan".)

  But the mechanics will work in most cases.

  The problem with getting someone to write an officially-sanctioned one
  is that there are always the oddball cases, which require a lot more
  trouble to anticipate and code for.

response 107 of 118:

Feb 24 21:02 UTC 2007

If your .forward file only contains a pipe to procmail, then yeah,
you don't need to do it to .forward.

The lines I provided only act on the .forward.  You would duplicate
them if you wanted lines that would act similarly on the .procmailrc

sed is a "stream editor" -- that is, it performs alterations on a 
stream of input and then sends the results somewhere.  sed can also
be used to do in-place edits on many files using the "-i" flag.
The syntax used by sed commands (e.g. "s/keesan/foobar/" comes from
a very early Unix editor, ed, but will be quite familiar to users
of ed's descendants (e.g. ex, vi, nvi, vim, etc..)

response 109 of 118:

Feb 25 00:32 UTC 2007

cat ~keesan/procmailrc.sample | sed -e/keesan/$USER/ >> ~./procmailrc

This is supposed to append my sample file to a user's .procmailrc rather than
back up and replace it.  Similarly for .forward.  Would that be okay?
If I get something working, perhaps staff could put it some place other than
my home directory, on the path.  Or at least link to it.

response 111 of 118:

Feb 25 00:46 UTC 2007

If I get more than 10 responses to the offer, perhaps some staff member could
set up something more permanent, that would be easier than running a script
in my directory.

response 113 of 118:

Feb 27 01:47 UTC 2007

Actually, I've got a better idea: let's get hooked up being one of
messagelabs.com's customers.

response 115 of 118:

Mar 23 13:04 UTC 2007

Grex hasn't used sendmail for years.

response 117 of 118:

Mar 29 17:36 UTC 2007

Then perhaps you'd volunteer to maintain it?