Department of Geography Computer Labs

Pine FAQ's (see http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/#1 for more info.)

What does PINE stand for?

Program for Internet News and Email

Q. What happens when two Pine sessions access the same mailbox at the same time?

A. The last session to open a folder will get full access to the folder and the previous session(s) will be changed to read-only access. When a folder is read-only, you will not see any further updates to that folder until it is reopened with full access. Currently the INBOX cannot be reopened without exiting and restarting Pine.

Q. What does the message "locked, override in _XXX_ sec" mean?

A. The message ""locked, will override in _xxx_ seconds"" occurs when Pine has discovered that some other mail program claims to be accessing your mail folder (i.e. _folder_.lock exists). This is a very low-level lock used by programs such as the system mailer in delivering mail, and by certain programs such as mail, elm, babyl, mm, etc. Supposedly, this lock is only to be acquired and held for a very short period of time (less than a second).

Pine starts with 285 seconds, retries every second, and issues that message every 15 seconds. The total period of time, 5 minutes, is the time that it will keep on trying before it concludes that the lock is false -- that is, that whatever program locked the folder forgot to unlock it (perhaps it crashed) -- and Pine will go ahead and claim the lock for itself.

This is not due to a conflict between two copies of Pine, since Pine interlocks against itself in a higher-level fashion.