Re: MAIL, MAILPATH and maildir support

[Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Bart Schaefer" wrote:
> However, maybe we should
> consider having a special function name (like precmd and preexec) that,
> if it's defined, is called in place of the built-in mail-check procedure.
> ...
> I can
> say with a fair degree of confidence that previous zsh maintainers would
> vote in favor of using the existing precmd/periodic mechanism, but the
> problem with that is that you can't set it up "transparently" to use the
> standard set of shell variables (because you can't -stop- zsh from doing
> the check on its own if those variables are set).

Yes, indeed, I was thinking about that.  It doesn't stop you using a
different set of variables and unsetting MAILCHECK, of course, but that's a
little crufty.  On the other hand, we could introduce a special syntax,
e.g.  MAILCHECK could be (say) 60?checkname where checkname was the
function to run instead of the standard code.  How does that sound?  I
don't see any compatibility problems --- or is there something that could
fail because MAILCHECK is a scalar rather than an integer?

If I implemented this, I would try and produce a function to reproduce the
current checkmailpath to make it easier for people to hack it.  I suspect
this would use the stat module, otherwise it's going to be messy, but maybe
there are some tricks with globs.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>       Tel: +39 050 844536
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/
Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarroti 2, 56127 Pisa, Italy