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msh(1) General Commands Manual msh(1) NAME msh - MH shell (only available within the message handling system, mh) SYNOPSIS msh [ -help ] [ -prompt string ] [ file ] DESCRIPTION The command msh is an interactive program that implements a subset of the normal MH commands operating on a single file in packf format. That is, msh is used to read a file that contains a number of messages, as opposed to the standard MH style of reading a number of files, each file being a separate message in a folder. The chief advantage of msh is that, unlike the normal MH style, it al- lows a file to have more than one message in it. In addition, msh can be used on other files, such as message archives which have been packed using packf. When invoked, msh reads the named file, and enters a command loop. You can type most of the normal MH commands. The syntax and semantics of these commands typed to msh are identical to their MH counterparts. In cases where the nature of msh would be inconsistent with the way MH works (for example, specifying a +folder with some commands), msh will duly inform you. The commands that msh currently supports are: ali burst comp dist folder forw inc mark mhmail ms- gchk next packf pick prev refile repl rmm scan send show sortm whatnow whom In addition, msh has a help command which gives a brief overview of all the msh options. To terminate msh, either type <CTRL/D>, or use the quit command. If the file is writable and has been modified, then us- ing quit will ask you if the file should be updated. A redirection facility is supported by msh. Commands may be followed by one of the following standard symbols: | Open an interprocess channel; connect output to another com- mand. > Write output to file. >> Append output to file. If file starts with a tilde (~), then a C-shell-like expansion takes place. Note that commands are interpreted by sh(1). When parsing commands to the left of any redirection symbol, msh will honor the backslash (\) as the quote next-character symbol, and double quotes (") as quote-word delimiters. All other input tokens are sepa- rated by white space (spaces and tabs). You may wish to use an alternative profile for the commands that msh executes; see mh_profile(4) for details of the $MH environment vari- able. FLAGS -help Prints a list of the valid options for this command. -prompt string Sets the prompt for msh. If the string you specify includes white space, you must enclose it in double quotes ("). If you do not specify this option, the default prompt is (msh). The following defaults are used by msh: file defaults to ./msgbox -prompt (msh) RESTRICTIONS The msh shell is not the C-shell, and a lot of the facilities provided by the latter are not present in the former. In particular, msh does not support back-quoting, history substitutions, variable substitu- tions, or alias substitutions. msh does not understand back-quoting. The only effective way to use pick inside msh is to always use the -seq select option. If you add the following line to your .mh_profile, pick will work equally well from both the shell and msh: pick: -seq select -list There is a strict limit of messages per file in packf format which msh can handle. Usually, this limit is 1000 messages. PROFILE COMPONENTS tab(+); l l. Path:+To determine your Mail directory Msg-Protect:+To set protections when creating a new file fileproc:+Program to file mes- sages showproc:+Program to show messages FILES $HOME/.mh_profile The user profile. /usr/lib/mh/mtstailor The system customization file. RELATED INFORMATION csh(1), packf(1), sh(1), mh_profile(4) delim off msh(1)