mailptch.txt -- patch for the Minix mail program Al Woodhull 2003-07-19 This patch adds a "Subject:" header to messages generated by the Minix mail program. A subject can be specified by using a "-s" option on the command line when invoking the program. If the "-s" option is not used a "Subject: No subject" line is added to each message. The motivation for this patch was to make the Minix mail program compatible with the new Minix cron program introduced with Minix release 2.0.3. Like the cron daemons of many other *nix variants, the new cron tries to send a mail message to the owner of a cron job, rather than writing to a log file. In most *nix variants automatically generated mail messages can have a subject line specified by a "-s" command line option, and the new cron expects this. A "To:" header is also added to each message -- on a Minix system one person may read e-mail addressed to several different usernames, and it seems useful to keep the information about whom each message was originally addressed to when messages are saved to files outside the spool directory. In studying the source code for mail I found that some other options were added by Will Rose long ago that were never documented in the man page. They have probably been present in the distributed version since the release of Minix 1.5 in 1991. These are a "-e" option which makes the mail program exit with a returned value indicating whether mail is present or not, and a "-t" option which controls whether a "Dist:" header showing other recipients of a message is added to a mail message to multiple recipients. I have expanded the mail.1 man page to document all options. Installation: Make changes while logged on as bin. The mailptch.tar.Z archive contains a diff file, mail.cdiff and a new mail.1 man page. Apply the diff to the original /usr/src/commands/simple/mail.c using the patch utility and then execute "make /usr/bin/mail" in that directory. The new mail.1 file should be copied to /usr/man/man1/mail.1. asw 2003-07-19