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From: schaefer@ogicse.ogi.edu (Barton E. Schaefer)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mush
Subject: Re: picking and sorting
Message-ID: <7682@ogicse.ogi.edu>
Date: 2 Mar 90 23:22:48 GMT
References: <619@kauai.ACA.MCC.COM>
Organization: Oregon Graduate Institute (formerly OGC), Beaverton, OR
Lines: 53

In article <619@kauai.ACA.MCC.COM> duanev@kauai.ACA.MCC.COM (Duane Voth) writes:
} I've been trying to pick and sort messages (letters? articles?)
} in a folder but I keep getting this:
} 	Range not broad enough to sort anything
} my command is:
} 	pick -t <pattern> | sort a
} pick -t <pattern> by itself finds about 30 out of 94 messages.
} sort with 's' and 'd' do the same thing.  what am I missing?

What you are missing is that the messages to be sorted must be in a
contiguous block, that is, their numbers must be consecutive.  So you
can sort 1-5, or 3-12, or 7-17, but not 1,3,5-7,12,17.  You can only
pipe "pick" into "sort" if you have pre-sorted on the same field you
will be selecting with pick.

Since there isn't any option to sort on the "To" field, "pick -t" is
most likely NOT returning a consecutive list, so sort gets upset.

The closest you can come with only pick and sort is

    sort a ; pick -t <pattern>

which sorts ALL messages by author and then returns the ones "to" whoever
in the right order.

However,there were some "cut" and "paste" cmds posted here a while back.
The idea is to use "save" (followed by possible delete/update) to cut and
"merge" to paste.  So:

    pick -t <pattern> | save pick.file | delete
    update	# optional
    merge pick.file | sort a
    sh rm pick.file

} also, is there a way to "partition" the current folder

Not really.  You can bundle all the related messages into a digest and
use "undigest" to unpack them when you want to look at them separately.
There isn't any good way to build the digest except to save all the
messages into a file, change all the "From " (no colon) lines to ">From "
and add a line with 8 hyphens (--------) above each >From.  I could try
to explain how to do this from automatically from mush, but it's tricky.

Maybe digest-building would be a good thing for mush to support ...

At some point mush will support cut/paste and multiple open folders,
which could be used to implement your partitioning.  But not yet; at
least not in the next release ...
-- 
Bart Schaefer          "February.  The hangnail on the big toe of the year."
                                                                    -- Duffy

schaefer@cse.ogi.edu (used to be cse.ogc.edu)