Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!amdcad!sun!ichthous!mcgrew
From: mcgrew@ichthous.Sun.COM (Darin McGrew)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: Re: Showing the first message in a sequence
Message-ID: <101352@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 26 Apr 89 19:23:04 GMT
References: <306@odi.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: mcgrew@sun.UUCP (Darin McGrew)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 56

In article <306@odi.UUCP>
odi!benson@talcott.harvard.edu (Benson Margulies) writes:
>I wanted a way to show the first unseen message in a folder...

Here is my ~/bin/first script.  It uses a feature in MH 6.5
pick; if -list is specified, and nothing matches, the pick
command prints "0" so that other MH commands won't use their
default message sequence.  It also does all sorts of things
to be MH-like.

My script is basically the same as yours, except that it
passes options to pick instead of passing options to show.
This allows you to specify other folders besides the current
folder, and all sorts of other things like that.

Darin McGrew		mcgrew@Sun.COM

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#!/bin/sh
CMD=`basename $0`
unseen="`sed -n '/Unseen-Sequence: */s///p' $HOME/.mh_profile`"
USAGE="syntax: $CMD [+folder] [msgs] [switches]
  msgs		default is '$unseen'; must precede any switches
  switches	see pick(1):
"

#
# Do we show the first or the last match?
#
case "$CMD" in
first)	which=head;;
last)	which=tail;;
*)	echo "$CMD: must be invoked as 'first' or as 'last'" >&2
	exit 1;;
esac

#
# Do we need to specify the unseen sequence?
#
for i
do
	case "$i" in
	-help)	echo "$USAGE" >&2
		pick -help >&2
		exit 0;;
	-*)	break;;
	+*)	;;
	*)	unseen=;;
	esac
done

#
# Show the first matching message
#
show `pick -list $unseen "$@" | $which -1`
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