Re: [Nmh-workers] mh and mairix and numerically named folders

[norm]

Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> writes:
>>so my question, before i report this as a limitation with mairix:  is
>>there any reason that an MH folder shouldn't have an all-numeric name?
>>i did grep the man pages a bit, but didn't find a specification for
>>folder names
>
>So, the answer is ... you should not have a folder with an all-numeric name.
>
>I looked at folder_read(), the main function that nmh uses to scan a
>folder and create the folder structure (which contains an index of all
>valid messages).  It calls readdir() on a directory and checks to see if
>atoi() works on the filename; if it succeeds then it assumes that it's a
>message.  It does NOT check if the file is a directory or not (normally
>stat() is not called on every message as that would be too expensive).
>In theory you could use d_type that's part of struct dirent to see if
>it's a file or not, but not all operating systems or filesystems support
>that and I am reluctant to change long-standing practice for what is
>admittedly an edge case.
>
>While it may 'work' in the short term, I think like Conrad said you'll
>run into problems in the long run.

It is interesting that, to the best of my memory, we never considered the
possibility that an MH directory could have a numeric name. Though, that
might be more a function of my memory than of history.

We certainly did consider and extensively discuss possible message names
before deciding that they were to be numeric.


    Norman Shapiro