Need help with mh *and* mail on RISC/Ultrix 4.1

[Steven Winikoff]

I'm having two separate problems, one with mh and one with 
/usr/ucb/mail.  Both occur regularly under Ultrix 4.1 on a
DECsystem 5500 and on a DECstation 2100.

First, mh:  I have *not* configured mh in any way. We're running the
standard vanilla flavour of mh that comes with the 4.1 unsupported
subsets.  Whenever I try to perform a shell escape under vi as 
called from the "comp" command, it fails with the message

    "csh: Permission denied"

(This occurs with the vi shell escape syntax of ":!cmd".  For whatever
reason, when invoked as "!!cmd", things work as they should!)

This behaviour is independent of the nature of the command.  I've
tried shell builtins, I've tried relative paths, absolute paths, I've
even tried using /bin/sh and /local/bin/tcsh instead of /bin/csh.

What's going on????


With /usr/ucb/mail, one of our users is trying to save his outgoing
mail.  "No problem", you say.  All he has to do is

   set record=~/some_file

in his .mailrc, right?  That's what I thought too.  That's what the
man page says he *should* be able to do.  Can he do it?  Nope.  All
that he gets for his pains is the message

   "is a directory"

It doesn't even attempt to explain just what it thinks is a 
directory, and it certainly doesn't explain why it thinks that.

This is decidedly unfriendly.

If anyone has any ideas about what's happening here, *please* let
me know!  

Thanks a lot,

   Steven

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Winikoff                                 smw at antares.concordia.ca
Software Analyst
Dept. of Computing services
Concordia University                            voice: (514) 848-7619
Montreal, Quebec, Canada                               (10:00-18:00 EST)