symlink of /home causes mail delivery failure

[Gordon Messmer]

Steve Siegfried wrote:
> Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote:
>   
>> Is there any reason that procmail (or anything else) would fail if /home 
>> is a symlink?
>>     
> It depends on:
>
>   - What shell you're using:  When presented with a directory symlink like
>     "/home/A -> /tmp/A", environment variable HOME defined as "/home/A",
>     and the command "cd $HOME", some shells (sh for example) won't update
>     the cwd variable when they get there.  Thus the shell (sh in this
>     example) will yield funny results:
> 		# cd $HOME
> 		# echo $PWD
> 		/home/A
> 		# pwd
> 		/home/A
> 		# /bin/pwd
> 		/tmp/a
>   

Why would that matter?  /home/A/Inbox and /tmp/A/Inbox will still be the 
same file, so this shouldn't actually create a problem.

>  - The type of symlink reference you've used.  "/home/A -> /tmp/A"
>    will normally cause less trouble than "/home/A -> ../../tmp/A".
>   

That is precisely wrong.  Using relative paths (which would be ../tmp/A, 
not ../../tmp/A) will be less problematic.  When your system is mounted 
in a different location by a rescue CD, for instance, relative paths 
will work properly, but absolute paths will not.