What's the flag for the alias-file pipe to msgs under 3.1/2.1?

[Ian MacPhedran,2B13 Eng.,4832]

>From article <5435 at buengc.BU.EDU>, by bph at buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton):
> In article <5434 at buengc.BU.EDU> bph at buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
>>
>> [[paraphrased: msgs is not in the man pages & can /usr/msgs be a link?]]
>>
> Okay, for no good reason I typed "msgs -s" on the keyboard and it
> works fine.  Even the symbolic link /usr/msgs -> /usr/local/msgs
> has no problem.  The problem is in the mailer itself, then.
> 
> But all it says in the bounce-message is:
> 
>     554 "|/usr/ucb/msgs -s"... unknown mailer error 13
> 
> Would anyone happen to have a PD msgs, or some Clues?

I had a similar problem with operating msgs on our semi-diskless
DECStation 2100s. /usr is nfs mounted from a (distant) server who does
not want our messages posted on it. As we were not allowed to write to
the /usr partition, we would receive errors from mail sent to msgs.

What I did was export a directory from one workstation to all the
workstations (including itself) and mounted that directory over
/usr/msgs (even on the exporting workstation). After that, msgs
appeared to work well. (Probably because only a few msgs are ever
posted here - otherwise, we might run into problems similar to
having NFS mounted mail partitions.)

Ian.
Ian MacPhedran, Engineering Computer Centre, University of Saskatchewan.
2B13 Engineering Building, U. of S. Campus, Saskatoon, Sask., CANADA S7N 0W0
macphed at dvinci.USask.CA  macphedran at sask.USask.CA  macphedran at sask.BITNET