.\" -*-nroff-*- .\" .\" .\" Copyright (C) 1996-1998 Michael R. Elkins .\" Copyright (C) 1998-1999 Thomas Roessler .\" Copyright (C) 2005-2018 Roland Rosenfeld .\" .\" This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify .\" it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by .\" the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or .\" (at your option) any later version. .\" .\" This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, .\" but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of .\" MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the .\" GNU General Public License for more details. .\" .\" You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License .\" along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, .\" Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301,, USA. .\" .TH dotlock 1 "JANUARY 2016" Unix "User Manuals" .SH NAME .PP lbdb_dotlock \- Lock mail spool files. .SH SYNOPSIS .PP .B lbdb_dotlock [\-t|\-f|\-u|\-d] [\-r \fIretries\fP] \fIfile\fP .SH DESCRIPTION .PP .B dotlock implements the traditional mail spool file locking method: To lock \fIfile\fP, a file named \fIfile\fP.lock is created. .SH OPTIONS .PP .IP "\-t" Just try. .B dotlock won't actually lock a file, but inform the invoking process if it's at all possible to lock \fIfile\fP. .IP "\-f" Force the lock. If another process holds a lock on \fIfile\fP longer than a certain amount of time, .B dotlock will break that lock by removing the lockfile. .IP "\-u" Unlock. .B dotlock will remove \fIfile\fP.lock. .IP "\-d" Delete. .B dotlock will lock \fIfile\fP, remove it if it has length 0, and afterwards remove \fIfile\fP.lock. .IP "\-r \fIretries\fP" This command line option tells .B dotlock to try locking \fIretries\fP times before giving up or (if invoked with the .B \-f command line option) break a lock. The default value is 5. .B dotlock waits one second between successive locking attempts. .SH FILES .PP .IP "\fIfile\fP.lock" The lock file .B dotlock generates. .SH SEE ALSO .PP .BR fcntl (2), .BR flock (2), .BR lockfile (1), .BR lbdb-fetchaddr (1) .SH DIAGNOSTICS .PP .B dotlock gives all diagnostics in its return values: .TP .B "0 \- DL_EX_OK" The program was successful. .TP .B "1 \- DL_EX_ERROR" An unspecified error such as bad command line parameters, lack of system memory and the like has occurred. .TP .B "3 \- DL_EX_EXIST" The user wants to lock a file which has been locked by another process already. If .B dotlock is invoked with the .B \-f command line option, .B dotlock won't generate this error, but break other processes' locks. .TP .B "4 \- DL_EX_NEED_RPIVS" This return value only occurs if .B dotlock has been invoked with the .B \-t command line option. It means that .B dotlock will have to use its group mail privileges to lock \fIfile\fP. .TP .B "5 \- DL_EX_IMPOSSIBLE" This return value only occurs if .B dotlock has been invoked with the .B \-t command line option. It means that .B dotlock is unable to lock \fIfile\fP. .SH NOTES .PP .B dotlock tries to implement an NFS-safe dotlocking method which was borrowed from .BR lockfile (1). .PP If the user can't open \fIfile\fP for reading with his normal privileges, dotlock will return the .B DL_EX_ERROR exit value to avoid certain attacks against other users' spool files. The code carefully avoids race conditions when checking permissions; for details of all this see the comments in dotlock.c. .SH HISTORY .PP .B dotlock is part of the Mutt mail user agent package. It has been created to avoid running mutt with group mail privileges. .SH AUTHOR Thomas Roessler