Re: flist -- "Killed" -- oom (*not* 1.8 related)

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Thu, 02 Mar 2023 09:49:23 +0300
    From:        Greg Minshall <minshall@umich.edu>
    Message-ID:  <814300.1677739763@archlinux>

  | bash archlinux (master): {49603} ls -a 74600607886815/

That would do it.

  | and, i guess, flist decided that
  | (under the ~/Mail/MHE-INDEX folder) was a message number?
  |
  | does that make sense?

yes.

  | i guess mh-e could not create such subfolders
  | with names consisting only of decimal integers (i have some
  | hexadecimal-named folders which don't seem to give a problem).

That, or have the index put in some tree outside your mh mail tree.

  | or, i could not search for such.

That sounds a bit draconian

  | or, maybe flist (or, nmh in general?) could
  | not think that a directory was a message?

On a standard system that would require a stat of every potential
message number named like directory entry.  If that was to be done
flist would need to be renamed to be slist instead.

On filesystems that support d_type in the directory entries it would
be possible, but would need the stat() fallback whenever it sees
DT_UNKNOWN which on many systems is lukely to be always.

Better would be to fix mhe to always add a 1 char non-numeric
prefix to directories it creates (perhaps '_', even ' '), and then
there is no confusion any more.

kre