Strange behaviour of access

["Harald Hanche-Olsen" <hanche@imf.unit.no>]

Here is one that has me puzzled.  I like to have the same .esrc and
supporting files everywhere, and since the mail directory is in different
locations on different machines I use the lines

MAIL=<={access -rd1 /var/mail /var/spool/mail /usr/spool/mail}^/^$USER
if {~ $MAIL ()} {echo 'WARNING: No mail directory!' >[1=2]}

to locate the appropriate directory.  The surprising thing is that this
almost always triggers the warning when I log in on a Solaris 2.3 host.
 Manually sourcing the file containing these lines later always cures the
problem.  At first I thought it was due to automounter magic, but the mail
directory is never automounted, it is typically explicitly NFS mounted.

Any ideas what is going on?

- Harald