/bin/mail,rmail

[Alexis Rosen]

dittman at skbat.csc.ti.com (Eric Dittman) writes:
>Two days ago my A/UX 2.0 systems locked up and had to be reset.  The
>fs check failed and told me to run fsck manually, which I did.  fsck
>had problems with /bin/mail and /bin/rmail and wanted to delete them,
>so I did.  After fsck finished I was able to boot A/UX.  I mounted
>the CD-ROM distribution on /mnt and copied /mnt/bin/*mail to /bin and
>then did a chmod/chgrp/chown so the copies in /bin matched the copies
>in /mnt/bin.  I then called my mail feed and a file was sent to me,
>but when I checked the mail I was told there was none, even though
>the appropriate file was in /usr/mail.  I took a look at the file
>and found it was an extract of some source written in 68K assembler,
>so I figured something was wrong.  I rechecked /mnt/bin and noticed
>there were 2 links to mail and rmail (from the count given by ls),
>but I don't know where the links are.  What links are missing?

Try this:
rm /bin/rmail ; ln /bin/mail /bin/rmail

Surprised? :-)

To be honest, I don't see how this could cause your problem, but I'm by
no means certain. One thing I'd point out- after much bitter experience
this week- when a crash messes up your file system to the point where it's
eating binaries that have never been modified, there's a good chance your
file system is on the verge of a gradual slide into a black hole. If you
can, I'd carefully back up anything important and reinstall the partition.
If you don't want to, try fscking it again. Fsck likes to clean up a partition
so that you think it's ok, but if the damage is severe, it will fool you-
new files will be screwy every time you run fsck, and eventually fsck will
eat your whole disk.

If you come out clean this time, maybe you're OK. But if fsck sees new bad
files, you're hosed. Back up what you can, while you can...

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis