PICK(1mh)

NAME
pick - select messages by content scan - produce a one line per message scan listing

SYNOPSIS

pick [+folder] [msgs] [-and ...] [-or ...] [-not ...] [-lbrace ... -rbrace] [--component pattern] [-cc pattern] [-date pattern] [-from pattern] [-search pattern] [-subject pattern] [-to pattern] [-after date] [-before date] [-datefield field] [-format formatfile] [-width columns] [-thread [+folder]messages|files] [-file mboxfilename] [-sequence name ...] [-public | -nopublic] [-zero | -nozero] [-list | -nolist] [-Version] [-help]

scan is equivalent to pick -format scan.default

typical usage:

    scan -from jones`
    pick -to holloway -sequence select
    show `pick -before friday`

DESCRIPTION
Pick searches within a folder for messages with the specified contents, and then identifies those messages. Two types of search primitives are available: pattern matching and date constraint operations.

The default regex(7) is used to perform the matching, so the full regular expression facility is available within pattern. With -search, pattern is used directly, but only for the body of the Mail. With the others, pick compares the header field name case insensitive and the tries to match the field body with the pattern.

With --componend you can specify the exact header field name you are looking for. It is used to pick a component which is not one of `To:', `Cc:', `Date:', `From:', or `Subject:'. An example is `pick --reply-to pooh'.

Pattern matching is performed on a per-header-field basis. Within the header of the message, each field is treated as one long line, but in the body, each line is separate. The pattern will match any case.

Note that since the -date switch is a pattern matching operation (as described above), to find messages sent on a certain date the pattern string must match the text of the `Date:' field of the message.

Independent of any pattern matching operations requested, the switches -after date or -before date may also be used to introduce date/time constraints on all of the messages. By default, the `Date:' field is consulted, but if another date yielding field (such as `BB-Posted:' or `Delivery-Date:') should be used, the -datefield field switch may be used.

With -before and -after, pick will actually parse the date fields in each of the messages specified in `msgs' and compare them to the date/time specified. If -after is given, then only those messages whose `Date:' field value is chronologically after the date specified will be considered. The -before switch specifies the complimentary action.

Both the -after and -before switches take legal 822-style date specifications as arguments. Pick will default certain missing fields so that the entire date need not be specified. These fields are (in order of defaulting): timezone, time and timezone, date, date and timezone. All defaults are taken from the current date, time, and timezone.

In addition to 822-style dates, pick will also recognize any of the days of the week (`sunday', `monday', and so on), and the special dates `today', `yesterday' (24 hours ago), and `tomorrow' (24 hours from now). All days of the week are judged to refer to a day in the past (e.g., telling pick `saturday' on a `tuesday' means `last saturday' not `this saturday'). Further more, dates in a simplified ISO 8601/RFC 3339 style (e.g. `YYYY-MM-DD' or `YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss') are accepted. Finally, in addition to these special specifications, pick will also honor a date specification of the form `-ddd', which means `ddd days ago'. For example,

    pick -after -30

identifies the messages of the last thirty days.

Pick supports complex boolean operations on the searching primitives with the -and, -or, -not, and -lbrace ... -rbrace switches. For example,

    pick -after yesterday -and
         -lbrace -from freida -or -from fear -rbrace

identifies messages recently sent by `frieda' or `fear'.

The matching primitives take precedence over the -not switch, which in turn takes precedence over -and which in turn takes precedence over -or. To override the default precedence, the -lbrace and -rbrace switches are provided, which act just like opening and closing parentheses in logical expressions.

If no search criteria are given, all the messages specified on the command line are selected (this defaults to `a').

Once the search has been performed, if the -list switch is given, the message numbers of the selected messages are written to the standard output separated by newlines. This is extremely useful for quickly generating arguments for other mmh programs by using the `backquoting' syntax of the shell. For example, the command

    show `pick +todo -after `31 Mar 83 0123 PST'`

says to show those messages in the indicated folder which meet the appropriate criterion. Note that since pick's context changes are written out prior to show's invocation, you need not give the folder argument to show as well.

The -sequence name switch may be given once for each sequence the user wishes to define. For each sequence named, that sequence will be defined to mean exactly those messages selected by pick. For example,

    pick -from frated -seq fred

defines a new message sequence for the current folder called `fred' which contains exactly those messages that were selected.

By default, pick will zero the sequence before adding it. This action can be disabled with the -nozero switch, which means that the messages selected by pick will be added to the sequence, if it already exists, and any messages already a part of that sequence will remain so.

The -public and -nopublic switches are used by pick in the same way mark uses them.

Scan and pick produces a one-line-per-message listing of the specified and selected folder or messages. The default format is for pick is to print the message number for each message. The default Scan line contains the message number (name), the date, the `From:' field and the `Subject' field. The following example shows the default output of scan

    15+     10/05 crocker nned
    16-    10/05 crocker message id format
    18      10/06 brien   Re: Exit status from mkdir
    19      10/07*brien   `scan' listing format in mmh

The `+' on message 15 indicates that it is the current message. The `-' on message 16 indicates that it has been replied to, as indicated by a `Replied:' component (produced by the -annotate switch to the repl command). The `*' on message 19 indicates that no `Date:' header was present. The time of last modification of the message is given instead. Scan actually reads each of the specified messages and parses them to extract the desired fields. During parsing, appropriate error messages will be produced if there are format errors in any of the messages.

By default, scan will decode RFC-2047 (MIME) encoding in these scan listings. Scan will only decode these fields if your terminal can natively display the character set used in the encoding. You should set the MM_CHARSET environment variable to your native character set, if it is not US-ASCII. See the mh-profile(5) man page for details about this environment variable.

The -file filename switch allows the user to obtain a scan listing of a maildrop file as produced by packf. This listing includes every message in the file (you can't scan individual messages).

The switch -width columns may be used to specify the width of the scan line. The default is to use the width of the terminal.

The command:

    (scan | pr ; show a -showproc pr) | lpr

produces a scan listing of the current folder, followed by a formatted listing of all messages in the folder, one per page. Omitting `-showproc pr' will cause the messages to be concatenated, separated by a one-line header and two blank lines.

To override the output format used by scan, the -form file switch is used. This permits individual fields of the scan listing to be extracted with ease. file is either the name of a format file or a format string directly, if prepended with an equal sign `='. See mh-format(5) for the details.

In addition to the standard mh-format(5) escapes, scan also recognizes the following additional component escapes:

    Escape      Returns Description
    dtimenow        date    the current date
    folder  string  the name of the current folder

If no date header is present in the message, the function escapes which operate on {date} will return values for the date of last modification of the message file itself. This feature is handy for scanning a draft folder, as message drafts usually aren't allowed to have dates in them.

scan will update the mmh context prior to starting the listing, so interrupting a long scan listing preserves the new context. nmh purists hate this idea.

FILES
^$HOME/.mmh/profile~^The user profile

PROFILE COMPONENTS
^Path:~^To determine the user's mail storage
^Alternate-Mailboxes:~^To determine the user's mailboxes
^Current-Folder:~^To find the default current folder

SEE ALSO
mark(1)

DEFAULTS
`+folder' defaults to the current folder
`msgs' defaults to all messages
`-datefield date'
`-zero'
`-list' is the default if no `-sequence', `-nolist' otherwise
`-format pick.default' if the program is called with scan `scan.default' is used

CONTEXT
If a folder is given, it will become the current folder.

HISTORY
In previous versions of MH, the pick command would show, scan, or refile the selected messages. This was rather `inverted logic' from the UNIX point of view, so pick was changed to define sequences and output those sequences. Hence, pick can be used to generate the arguments for all other MH commands, instead of giving pick endless switches for invoking those commands itself.

Also, previous versions of pick balked if you didn't specify a search string or a date/time constraint. The current version does not, and merely matches the messages you specify. This lets you type something like:

    show `pick l:20 -seq fear`

instead of typing

    mark -add -nozero -seq fear l:20
    show fear

Also, timezones used to be ignored when comparing dates: they aren't any more.

In MH , nmh and old mmh versions scan and pick where two different tools. So instand of typing

    scan -from philipp

you had typed

    scan `pick -from philipp`

With the default config the old style usage is still supported, so you can write scripts for both mmh and nmh.

HELPFUL HINTS
Use `pick sequence -list' to enumerate the messages in a sequence (such as for use by a shell script).

BUGS
Any occurrence of -datefield must occur prior to the -after or -before switch it applies to.

If pick is used in a back-quoted operation, such as

    scan `pick -from jones`

and pick selects no messages (e.g., no messages are from `jones'), then the shell will still run the outer command (e.g., scan). Since no messages were matched, pick produced no output, and the argument given to the outer command as a result of backquoting pick is empty. In the case of mmh programs, the outer command now acts as if the default `msg' or `msgs' should be used (e.g., `all' in the case of scan). To prevent this unexpected behavior, if -list was given, and if its standard output is not a tty, then pick outputs the illegal message number `0' when it fails. This lets the outer command fail gracefully as well.

To account for this case when combining pick with regular shell tools, filter out the message number `0'. For example, do

    pick ... | fgrep -vx 0 | wc -l

to count the number of messages picked.

The pattern syntax `[l-r]' is not supported; each letter to be matched must be included within the square brackets.