Help with UUCP

[hakanson]

Oh boy, a controversy!  Well, a disagreement, anyway.

>/* Written  4:16 pm  Jan  5, 1987 by jim at otto in orstcs:comp.unix.ques */
>In article <217000001 at orstcs.UUCP> hakanson at orstcs.UUCP (hakanson) writes:
>. . .
>>
>>From looking at the sources in 4.2bsd (and 4.3bsd, I presume), I found
>>that the minimum retry time is 5 minutes, even if you set it smaller.
>>I think the default was about 60 minutes, but I may have misremembered.
>>At any rate, this will probably be different on non-BSD uucp's....
>>
>(Opps.)
>
>Well, under 4.2 bsd and Sun3.0 Setting Any,1 or even Any,0
>will work as expected.	The DEFAULT retry time is 5 min.
>Read the source a little closer.
>. . .
>/* End of text from orstcs:comp.unix.ques */

Well, I did read the source a little closer, and it turns out I was
right in the first place (at least, with respect to the fairly vanilla
4.2bsd source on our VAX (now running 4.3bsd)).  From conn.c:

	/*  global variable Retrytime is set here  */
	if ((p = index(s, ',')) == NULL) {
		Retrytime = RETRYTIME;
	}
	else {
		i = sscanf(p+1, "%d", &rtime);
		if (i < 1 || rtime < 5)
			rtime = 5;
		Retrytime  = rtime * 60;
	}

The DEFAULT is RETRYTIME (55 minutes).  If the value given after
the "," is invalid or if it is less than 5, then 5 will be used.
Note that the code for 4.3bsd is almost identical, except that the
check for "rtime < 5" is changed to "rtime < 0", and this change may
have made it into later releases of 4.2bsd (so it seems likely that
we are both right).  Interestingly, it behaves differently if there
is no "," than if there is a "," with nothing following it (";" for
4.3bsd) -- I suppose this might be considered a feature by some.

Well, at least the memory (mine) hasn't flaked out this time....

Marion Hakanson         CSnet:  hakanson%oregon-state at csnet-relay
                        UUCP :  {hp-pcd,tektronix}!orstcs!hakanson