[gentoo-user] [possibly OT?] Bash-4 mailcheck oddity

[Willie Wong]

Hi list:

Finally upgraded to Bash-4 on my home desktop, and discovered a bit of
odd (as compared to Bash-3) behaviour with mail checking. 

What I do:
  In ~/.bashrc I have exported MAILCHECK=15, unset MAIL, and exported
  MAILPATH to a long list of mailboxes. I use procmail to pre-filter
  the mail into mailboxes before reading them, so the list of
  mailboxes (except for the general fallback spool file) are all boxes
  for storage as well as boxes for receiving incoming mail. 

What happened in Bash-3:
  When I start a bash session, when I log-in, nothing will show about
  mails. However, if during the session an e-mail comes in and is
  placed in one of the monitored mailboxes, an alert will come up
  after the execution of the next command in bash. 

  This is my desired behaviour.

What happens in Bash-4:
  As far as I can tell, the checking for new mail by comparing
  time-stamps on the mail boxes still works as before. New mail comes
  in, I get an alert. 

  What is annoying to me is that whenever I log-in now, after 15
  seconds (presumeably due to MAILCHECK=15), Bash tells me I have
  "new" mail in all 20 or so of the defined mailboxes. For some reason
  bash is now assuming all non-empty mailboxes mean new mail. 

My questions:
  (1) Does anyone know if this change in design is intentional? If so,
  is there anyway of turning it off? I just grepped through the man
  page but didn't see anything helpful, but I may have missed it. 

  (2) Can someone confirm with me this is not something funny on my
  end, but the actual behaviour of Bash-4?

Cheers, 

W
-- 
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