[plug] Shell pipe errors from smail

[Jeremy Malcolm]

Normally I would post this to comp.mail.smail or debian-users, except with
the burgeoning popularity of exim and postfix nobody seems to use smail
anymore so I thought I'd try the PLUG list first off instead.  Also, I tried
to send a message similar to this before but it didn't get through I think.
If it did, sorry.

Smail is giving me weird errors when it tries to pipe mail to a command.
This seems to occur if the command line has any spaces in it.  This only
started happening after I upgraded to woody-smail from slink-smail.  Smail
is not in potato (which I'm running), but that is because of an unrelated
critical bug.

Some of the commands that smail chokes on are listed below.  These include
pipes to procmail (from a .forward), to the majordomo wrapper, and to a
mail2news script (both from the aliases file), all of which have spaces in.
However a command line without a space (eg. "|/usr/bin/procmail") seems to
work OK.

Needless to say, in the examples below, when it says "No such file or
directory", it is lying through its teeth.  Also, omitting the double-quotes
doesn't help (in fact, it makes things worse: it gives "no such file" for
every space-separated word in the command line).  The config files have not
changed since the upgrade.

EXAMPLE 1:

|------------------------- Message log follows: -------------------------|
 /bin/sh: /usr/local/bin/mail2news.pl local.test: No such file or directory
|------------------------- Failed addresses follow: ---------------------|
 "|/usr/local/bin/mail2news.pl local.test" ... failed: transport pipe: child
returned status EX_127 (127)

EXAMPLE 2:

|------------------------- Message log follows: -------------------------|
 /bin/sh: exec /usr/bin/procmail #terminus: No such file or directory
|------------------------- Failed addresses follow: ---------------------|
 "|exec /usr/bin/procmail #terminus" ... failed: transport pipe: child
returned status EX_127 (127)

EXAMPLE 3:

|------------------------- Message log follows: -------------------------|
 /bin/sh: /usr/lib/majordomo/wrapper resend -C
/etc/smail/multihome/mensa/majordomo.cf -l ids-general
ids-general-outgoing at lists.au.mensa.org: No such file or directory
|------------------------- Failed addresses follow: ---------------------|
 "|/usr/lib/majordomo/wrapper resend -C
/etc/smail/multihome/mensa/majordomo.cf -l ids-general
ids-general-outgoing at lists.au.mensa.org" ... failed: transport pipe: child
returned status EX_127 (127)

EXAMPLE 4:

|------------------------- Message log follows: -------------------------|
 /bin/sh:  IFS=\: command not found
|------------------------- Failed addresses follow: ---------------------|
 "| IFS=' ' && exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #terminus" ... failed:
transport pipe: child returned status EX_TEMPFAIL (75)
|------------------------- Message text follows: ------------------------|

Any ideas?

TIA

--
JEREMY MALCOLM Jeremy at Malcolm.wattle.id.au http://malcolm.wattle.id.au
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