On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 10:40:16AM -0400, John P Verel wrote:
> I have antiword set up as my mailcap entry for viewing MSWord docs and
> it works great (thanks Sven :). What I'd also like to do, from time to
> time, is pipe a *.doc to AbiWord.
The problem is that piping and opening attachments work via different
mechanisms. Piping uses the UNIX concept of pipes, which is where it
gets its name, and you can't pipe to AbiWord. While many UNIX commands
are written to operate as a filter - reading from their standard input
instead of from a named file - AbiWord is not.
When you open an attachment, the attachment first gets saved to a
file on disk with some temporary name (like /tmp/foo.doc). In the
command from your mailcap, %s is then replaced with that filename
before the command is executed. So what ends up being run is, for example,
this:
abiword /tmp/foo.doc
But when you pipe to a command, the attachment isn't saved first. Mutt
just runs the command and then sends the data to it on its standard
input. It's as if you had typed just the command with no arguments:
abiword
and then started typing the contents of the attachment on your keyboard.
If you try to pipe to "abiword %s" then it just runs that command
literally, and abiword tries to open a file named '%s' and can't find
it.
Like you, I have antiword set up for everyday .doc reading, and fire up
AbiWord when antiword isn't enough. But I just save the attachment and
then run abiword on it:
s filename
!abiword filename
--
Mark REED | CNN Internet Technology
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Atlanta, GA 30348 USA | +1 404 827 4754
--
I can give you my word, but I know what it's worth and you don't.
-- Nero Wolfe, "Over My Dead Body"
