Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!itivax!lokkur!scs
From: scs@lokkur.UUCP (Steve Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: readmsg bug
Summary: Shell scripts, independant systems
Message-ID: <1443@lokkur.UUCP>
Date: 11 May 89 00:03:31 GMT
References: <25537@amdcad.AMD.COM> <JV.89May8101205@mhres.mh.nl>
Reply-To: scs@lokkur.dexter.mi.us (Steve Simmons)
Organization: Inland Sea Software, Ltd.
Lines: 27

In article <JV.89May8101205@mhres.mh.nl> jv@mh.nl (Johan Vromans) writes:
>What is the need for the "readmsg" program? It looks to me that it is
>lots of overhead to use an external tool to extract messages from the
>mailboxes. Each time it has to scan the whole file, parsing headers,
>counting messages, copying them etc etc ... And it's error-prone: no
>continuation-header lines, user-specified weedout list is not obeyed.
>All information needed is present in Elm the moment it's needed.

True, but this is a case of different tools for different purposes.
For example, if one wishes to split a mailbox into separate individual
files one can do:

messages > /dev/null 2>&1
MSG_COUNT=$?
COUNT=1
while [ $COUNT -le $MSG_COUNT ] ; do
	readmsg $COUNT > mbox.sub.$COUNT
	COUNT=`expr $COUNT + 1`
done

Very useful when faced with mailboxes bigger than your /tmp space!
Better yet, pipe the output off to some other program that doesn't
know how to break up messages.
-- 
Steve Simmons		...sharkey!lokkur!scs      scs@lokkur.dexter.mi.us
  "Gordon Way's astonishment at suddenly being shot dead was nothing to
       his astonishment at what happened next."  -- Douglas Adams