ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman) (02/12/90)
I receive mail from a couple of Bitnet-lists. Unfortunately not in
the order that the individual posts were originally submitted to
the respective server (don't ask me why). The distributed nature
of Listserv-function may have something to do with it, though.
When trying to manually reassemble the pieces into somewhat true-
sequential order I have to deal with plenty of time formats in the
mail headers. The most usual ones are in the form of HH:MM:SS TZT
(where TZT stands for a three-letter TimeZone-Time) but there are
also those that use the implied difference from GMT, in the form of
HH:MM:SS -0600.
What I'd like to have is some kind of a filter that would selectively
change the time format on predefined lines in /usr/spool/mail/usermbox
(or any other file) into some non-ambiguous, easily related-to; one,
that would use my local (or another, arbitrarily chosen,) time for a
default. Thus I'd never have to guess if something written at some
hour PST might have been of earlier date than that written at GMT -0300.
A companion (or extended) filter ought to sort the absolutized-date
entries into ascending- or descending-time order, based on chosen-
pattern lines inside a file.... could be a `perl' job?
--Ian Feldman / ianf@nada.kth.se || uunet!nada.kth.se!ianf
/ "Go ahead, make my day, tell me to RTFM"