checkmail (a cute little mailchecking utility)

[Mark Brader]

> > To start up the system, you will have to create the .m file ...
> Another coupla ways is to cp /dev/null .m , or ...

Not safely portable.  On some versions of UNIX (V7 at least), cp copies
the mode as well as the contents, without regard to your umask, so you
end up with .m world-writable.  Of course, for sh users, >.m is simplest.

Mark Brader