dave@lsuc.uucp (David Sherman) (01/11/88)
We run 4.1BSD Mail (on our v7-based system, no less),
and I've made a number of additions which are very
useful for our environment. Let me know if you want
them (and which ones):
z command: runs more(1) on the "Subject:" line, so
people can mail each other file names and read
the files with z. (I renamed the old, undocumented
z to "zcroll", and invoke it with zc to skip forward
a page of headers.)
Z command: runs sh -c on the "Subject:" line, so you can
mail someone a command to run from within mail.
N command: looks for a string enclosed by <...>, fires it
through dbm to find out the associated netnews
article file, and runs more(1) on the file. Very
useful if you exchange references to netnews with
friends on other machines, where the article numbers
will differ. (It's easy to get the Message-Id: line
into a mail message from rn.)
Expansion of aliases: when aliases are expanded (including
recursive expansions) from your .mailrc and /usr/lib/Mail.rc
files, it reports the expansion to you. E.g.
Expanding staff to: bill fred george mike tony
"indent" variable: if set, its value will be used in place of
the default (normally a tab, though we use "> ") for
text quoted with ~m.
-c and -b options for Bcc and Cc predefines. Very useful when
sending mail from shell scripts. Both
mail -c "bill fred" joe
and
mail -c bill -c fred joe
are allowed, and of course you can add to the list
using the normal ~b, ~c, ~h and Cc: prompt techniques.
I also added a "showto" variable which makes h show who mail
is addressed to rather than who it's from; I gather that some
later versions of Mail (of Sys V mailx) do almost exactly the same
thing, invented independently.
I assume most of the changes I've made would hack into 4.2 or
4.3 Mail fairly easily, though I don't know what other changes
have been made in those versions.
David Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Toronto
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