For some reason my newest install doesn't
precede prompts with "You have new mail in /var/mail/le"
as appropriate.
What turns this on or off?

("You have new mail" still appears on login).

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.

Louis Epstein <le@main.lekno.ws> writes:

> For some reason my newest install doesn't
> precede prompts with "You have new mail in /var/mail/le"
> as appropriate.
> What turns this on or off?

That's a feature of the shell. [I don't recall ever running into any
other way to do it, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone,
somewhere, had done it a different way.]

> ("You have new mail" still appears on login).

Oh, right. *That* would be an example of a different way, kind of.
That is driven by login.conf(5), and is not shell functionality. I
don't have the sources mounted, but offhand I'm pretty sure it's
implemented somewhere in the pam libraries or the login program.

So, all flippancy aside: how it's done depends on your shell.
However, the change in behavior may come from changes in environment
variables inherited by the shell, so the shell itself may not be the
thing that changed.

Be well.
--
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer
http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/

Louis Epstein <le@main.lekno.ws> writes:
> For some reason my newest install doesn't
> precede prompts with "You have new mail in /var/mail/le"
> as appropriate.
> What turns this on or off?

> ("You have new mail" still appears on login).

Your shell usually does that, and the answer would depend on which type
of shell you use. man {your shell} and search for mail.

For sh-type shells, I think just setting the environment variable MAIL
is enough to have it check the mailbox.

For csh-type shells, there's setenv mail your-mailbox, but also look at
the special aliases "periodic", "tperiod", "precmd", and "postcmd".
Of the special aliases, check precmd and tperiod first.
-WBE