Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!gatech!udel!rochester!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!msir From: msir@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Mark Sirota) Newsgroups: comp.mail.mush Subject: Re: Annoying misfeature? Message-ID: <3166@ur-cc.UUCP> Date: 28 Sep 89 21:19:02 GMT References: <1398@syma.sussex.ac.uk> <4889@ogccse.ogc.edu> Reply-To: Mark SirotaOrganization: Univ. of Rochester, Computing Center Lines: 33 In article <4889@ogccse.ogc.edu> schaefer@ogccse.UUCP (Barton E. Schaefer) writes: >In article <1398@syma.sussex.ac.uk> jasonh@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Jason Handby) writes: >> Unfortunately, mush won't deal with UNIX commands that contain numbers in >> their name (or anywhere in the path: [....] ). > > This is a documented backwards-to-ucbMail-feature. In Mail, it is not > necessary to separate message numbers/metachars from command names; so > you can use "d11" to delete message 11. Mush wants to be a little more > structured in its parsing, but also wants to maintain Mail compatibility. > > Breaking at numbers in the middle of a path like /user2/... is obviously > beyond the intent of this parsing. Shutting it off following a `/' is > a fairly trivial change, which I will make a note to get into the next > release. All right, let's get philosophical here. Some of us, perhaps many of us, no longer give a damn about UCB Mail, and would happily get rid of these braindead behaviors for backwards compatibility. I want a mailer that works right, not one that works similarly to another braindead mailer. I think the shutting-it-off-after-a-slash is not enough. It's a band-aid; it's curing the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that no parser can expect to do a reasonable job if there isn't any known delimiter between the command and its arguments. Give us a variable we can set (or unset, or whatever) to make it act right. You've already given us the "newline" variable along these lines... Keep up the good work. -- Mark Sirota - University of Rochester, Rochester, NY Internet: msir@cc.rochester.edu Bitnet: msir@uordbv.bitnet UUCP: {decvax,harvard,ames,rutgers}!rochester!ur-cc!msir