Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:01:12 -0600 From: Neil W Rickert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| The notation "+folder" for identifying a mail folder goes back at | least to ucbmail (/usr/ucb/Mail or /usr/ucb/mail or emulated by | mailx). I wouldn't presume that ucbmail is older than mh - as I recall it, they have a similar age, both were developed because of just how pathetic the 6th edition unix mail command was. Which of the two of them first picked '+' as a folder indicator, and was copied by the other I certainly would not guess, it's also possible (if perhaps a little unlikely) that they both adopted it independently. I'd not be surprised to learn that ucbmail picked up this syntax from mh (or perhaps they both adopted it from something older - from some other OS). To the topic, I personally don't care what +. and +.. are defined to mean, I'd prefer to avoid any kind of special case, or at least too much of a special case, but as long as they have a defined meaning, what it is doesn't really matter (I also doubt that almost anyone ever uses them). I do however want to keep the bare '+' to mean the top of the local folder tree - certainly in the mhpath command (I use mhpath + very frequently indeed - that's how to find the home of the components files, and all the other templates, and alias files). Then, if mhpath is going to use '+' that way, for consistency, so does everything else. I don't care that some sh constructs get a little harder to use, because sh doesn't (by default anyway) understand what the '+' is implying. There are easy workarounds for this which work just fine (and in any case some kind of workaround is essential, as normally the shell handles all relative paths wrt its current directory, where for MH we want them handled either relative to the folder root, or the current folder, and never relative to the process's current directory). I would also never pick the --word=thing syntax for anything, certainly it is more general (too general) but it is way too verbose to actually use on the command line by humans (for use in scripts or other places none of this really matters, and any syntax is OK). kre _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers