Cmail - check to see who's read their mail - UNIX
Steve Benz
steveb at cs.utexas.edu
Wed Oct 25 03:09:40 AEST 1989
tchrist at convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
[ In response to the people-who-don't-read-mail-checker ]
>
>Sigh. Yet another piece of system administrative hackery written in C...
>it seems like terrific overkill
>to do this in C. So as an exercise, I rewrote the program in perl (version
>3.0).
While I certainly find your program preferable to the original,
I question your choice of Perl instead of a shell script.
Granted, your Perl program would be faster on some systems, but
(at the risk of making a baseless assertion) the Bourne shell is
the standard language for writing administrative hackery.
>...Two comments on the
>original C code: doing getpwent()s until you run out is terribly innefficient
>on systems with long passwd files; mine is ~1300 lines long, and it would be
>better to do readdir()s on SPOOL and then getpwnam()s on the results.
Yes, but don't be so sure that:
- There aren't multiple spool directories--a common situation where
workstations are involved.
- There even is a spool directory at all--The new mail system here (& many
other sites, I believe) keeps mailboxes in the home directory of the user.
- Steve
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