Subject: Re: bug#10377: closed (Re: bug#10377: unrmail fails to produce any output for a empty BABYL folder)

From: Glenn Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:35:12 -0500

Mark Lillibridge wrote:

> have to understand that unrmail in batch mode is used to process a set
> of BABYL files to produce a parallel set of mbox files.  For example,
>
>     find Rmail -type f -exec grep -q '^BABYL OPTIONS' {} \; \
>           -exec ~/bin/emacs-22.3-install/bin/emacs -batch  \
>           -f batch-unrmail {} \; >& log
>
> Users likely would use further scripts to automatically move the
> resulting *.mail mbox files into place.  The correct behavior is simply
> to produce a zero length output file with no messages.

BABYL files with no messages are a fringe case of an obsolete format. 
Since unrmail has never produced output for these files, I'm not going 
to spend any more time on changing this now. If this is something you 
actually need to handle in practice on a frequent basis, I suggest using 
a handful of extra shell commands to check for empty BABYL files and
treat them separately.