MH is the name of a powerful message handling system.
Rather then being a single comprehensive program,
MH consists of a collection of fairly simple
single-purpose programs to send, receive, save,
and retrieve messages. The user should refer
to the MH User's Manual
and the pages for the MH
programs in the Unix Programmers Manual.
Unlike mail, the standard UNIX mail user interface program,
MH is not a closed system which must be explicitly run,
then exited when you wish to return to the shell.
You may freely intersperse MH commands with other shell commands,
allowing you to read and answer your mail while you have (for example)
a compilation running,
or search for a file or run programs as needed to find the answer to
someone's question before answering their mail.
The rest of this manual entry is a quick tutorial which will teach you the
basics of MH.
You should read the manual entries for the individual programs for complete
documentation.
To get started using MH, put the directory
/usr/bin/mh on your $PATH.
This is best done in one of the files:
.profile, .login, or .cshrc
in your home directory.
(Check the manual entry for the shell you use,
in case you don't know how to do this.)
Run the inc command.
If you've never used MH before,
it will create the necessary default files and directories after
asking you if you wish it to do so.
inc moves mail from your system maildrop
into your MH `+inbox' folder,
breaking it up into separate files
and converting it to MH format as it goes.
It prints one line for each message it processes,
containing the from field, the subject field
and as much of the first line of the message as will fit.
It leaves the first message it processes as your current message.
You'll need to run inc each time you wish to incorporate new mail
into your MH file.
scan prints a list of the messages in your current folder.
The commands:
show, next, and prev
are used to read specific messages from the current folder.
show displays the current message,
or a specific message, which may be specified by its number,
which you pass as an argument to show.
next and prev display, respectively,
the message numerically after or before the current message.
In all cases, the message displayed becomes the current message.
If there is no current message,
show may be called with an argument,
or next may be used to advance to the first message.
rmm (remove message) deletes the current message.
It may be called with message numbers passed as arguments,
to delete specific messages.
repl is used to respond to the current message (by default).
It places you in the editor with a prototype response form.
While you're in the editor,
you may peruse the item you're responding to by reading the file @.
After completing your response,
type l to review it,
or s to send it.
comp allows you to compose a message by putting you in the editor on
a prototype message form,
and then lets you send it.
All the MH commands may be run with the single argument: `-help',
which causes them to print a list of the arguments they may be invoked with.
Commands which take a message number as an argument
(scan, show, repl, ...)
also take one of the words:
first, prev, cur, next, or last
to indicate (respectively) the first, previous, current, next, or last
message in the current folder (assuming they are defined).
Commands which take a range of message numbers
(rmm, scan, show, ...)
also take any of the abbreviations:
+5
<num1>-<num2>
- Indicates all messages in the range <num1> to <num2>, inclusive. The range
must
be nonempty.
<num>:+N
<num>:-N
- Up to
N
messages beginning with (or ending with) message
num.
Num
may be any of the pre-defined symbols:
first, prev, cur, next
or
last.
first:N
prev:N
next:N
last:N
- The first, previous, next or last
N
messages, if they exist.
-5
There are many other possibilities such as creating multiple folders for
different topics, and automatically refiling messages according to subject,
source, destination, or content.
These are beyond the scope of this manual entry.
Following is a list of all the MH commands:
