On 2/18/07, Bill Sconce <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
P.S. The prize has yet to be awarded. Ben's explanation is close, but his wording (including that "perhaps") makes me hold out for one or two details.
Well, I'm not really familiar with MH in practice; I've read a FAQ and a web page or two, is all. So I can only speculate. But your "grep" command should certainly find all the messages containing "hosstraders". I double-checked, and the messages in question do indeed contain said string. You did a case-insensitive search, so that's not it. So I don't think the problem is with your usage of grep itself. Now, looking at your filename path: ~/Mail/...gnhlug.x/* that looks a little funky to me. I'm ass-uming the ellipse (...) is just you omitting the full path for brevity, and you don't actually have a folder named <...gnhlug.x>. I have no idea what the <.x> might signify; I'm hoping it's not something like a read-vs-unread distinction. But ultimately, you're asking for all files in a directory: There's a directory separator there (/) followed by just a star. Not knowing enough about MH, I decided to just ass-ume the message in question is in a file in that directory. (If that's wrong, all bets are off.) That leaves the order of presentation as the only place I can think of where things could go wrong. Based on the information in your original message, you started at the end and worked backwards, assuming the results were dated order. If they were *not* in dated order, you would have been tripped up. So that seemed a good line of reasoning to pursue. Looking at the pipeline you posted, there's nothing in there that appears to specify any ordering at all. It's just a search for a string. As far as I know, neither the generic Unix filesystem, nor the shell, specify any ordering of files. They could be returned in a different random order every time and still be "legal". There's certainly nothing that says they have to return your email message files sorted by the date of the message. So I decided that's the most likely possible problem. If you want me to get more specific in my speculation, there's a couple possibilities I can think of. One is that your system did not receive/sort the mail in the order it was originally sent. All sorts of that might happen (mail server issues, spam, spam filtering, your own mail organization, etc.). Another possibility is that perhaps the files were returned in ASCII sort order, not numeric sort order, and you happened to hit bad luck around the message numbers. That is to say, if I have files named <1>, <3>, and <2438>, and apply a simple ASCII sort is applied, <2438> will come before <3>. -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
