Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!ken
From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: non-interactive MH
Message-ID: <7014@sol.ARPA>
Date: 22 Feb 88 00:53:10 GMT
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 26

One of the things that irks me most about MH is the apparent inability
to use programs non-interactively. For instance I would sometimes like
to have an at job automatically dist notes.  You would think you could
feed stdin to MH programs, but no, prompter needs one EOF to exit and
then of course by definition there is nothing input left to send the
's' <return> to whatnow.

May I propose an option to prompter that would accept a dot (.) on a
line all by itself as EOF? This option would also supress the prompts
for the unfilled fields. Then I could do this from a script, assuming I
have the usual Resent-To and Resent-CC fields:

	% dist <<EOF
	jack, joe
	myself
	.
	s
	EOF

Is there a better way to do what I want? Don't tell me about the rcvxxx
programs, I know about those (they don't read MH_PROFILE for one thing
and I can't use my alias file) and I think those would have been
unnecessary if the standard MH programs had been designed to take stdin
as well.

	Ken