Re: [Nmh-workers] mh and mairix and numerically named folders

[Ken Hornstein]

>so my question, before i report this as a limitation with mairix:  is
>there any reason that an MH folder shouldn't have an all-numeric name? 
>i did grep the man pages a bit, but didn't find a specification for
>folder names

So, the answer is ... you should not have a folder with an all-numeric name.

I looked at folder_read(), the main function that nmh uses to scan a
folder and create the folder structure (which contains an index of all
valid messages).  It calls readdir() on a directory and checks to see if
atoi() works on the filename; if it succeeds then it assumes that it's a
message.  It does NOT check if the file is a directory or not (normally
stat() is not called on every message as that would be too expensive).
In theory you could use d_type that's part of struct dirent to see if
it's a file or not, but not all operating systems or filesystems support
that and I am reluctant to change long-standing practice for what is
admittedly an edge case.

While it may 'work' in the short term, I think like Conrad said you'll
run into problems in the long run.

--Ken