On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 09:14:02PM EST, Kyle Wheeler wrote: > On Thursday, December 25 at 07:56 PM, quoth Chris Jones: > >`ls > /tmp/ls` > > > >.. in my .muttrc .. and despite an error message to the effect that the > >command doesn't exist .. it actually works. > > The reason it generates the error is because mutt doesn't ignore empty > strings. Therefore, it's trying to interpret the empty string as if it > was a command. You can silence the error like so: > > set my_junk=`ls > /tmp/ls` > > ~Kyle
Thanks .. I must be particularly thick today.. I clearly am clueless as to how mutt's parser operates .. but where's the empty string? Do you mean that once `ls > /tmp/ls` is executed there is nothing left since the output of the command is redirected to a file? How is that different from an empty line in the .muttrc? Also, since the underscore is a pain to type, I had initially entered: 'set myjunk=`ls > /tmp/ls` And that gave me a different error message when I restared mutt: 'line 111: myjunk: unknown variable'.. and in this case, the contents of /tmp/ls were _not_ modified. Does mutt's config file syntax actually require that user variable names contain an underscore? Or is it that there is something special about the "my_junk" variable? Thanks, CJ