From: utzoo!decvax!microsof!fluke!jeff Newsgroups: net.bugs.4bsd Title: Trouble at the post office Article-I.D.: fluke.756 Posted: Tue Feb 22 21:59:15 1983 Received: Wed Feb 23 06:14:52 1983 There is apparently a race condition in mail(1) wherein 2 simultaneous mailings to one person to become snarled or lost. I have two shell scripts which run in parallel and finish by mailing me their results. Unfortunately, the UNIX scheduler is so equanimous that the two scripts complete within one second of each other. The result? Sometimes both mailings are received. Sometimes just one. And now I just received the definitive piece of junk mail - one message comprising both files. They were interleaved in chunks of 2048 bytes (interesting, no?). Unfortunately, the total was less than the sum of the parts. About half of each file disappeared into the ether. Jeff Stearns ...!decvax!microsoft!fluke!jeff John Fluke Mfg. Co., Everett WA. (206) 356-5064 BTW, we run 4.1BSD.