Show MIME Message Parts with showpart

When you show parts of messages with mhn -part, you'll see the message header before you see the part. You may have mhn configured to pause and prompt with "Press <return> to show content" before it displays body parts with that content-type. If you just want to see the contents of the part, you could configure mhn -store to write the part to its standard output -- but it wouldn't use a pager program and, besides, mhn -store has a bug in MH 6.8.3 that prevents writing to standard output.

The MH command version named showpart solves all of those problems. It shows a message part with a pager, with no header, and with no pause before the part. Unfortunately, showpart has to use undocumented mhn switches to do this: -nomoreproc and -moreproc. So showpart may not work after MH 6.8.3.

The first argument to showpart is the part number you want to see. Any other arguments can be additional mhn options and/or message numbers. For example, to show part 1 of messages 8 through 10:

% showpart 1 8-10

Add the following entry to your MH profile, or add the arguments to your alias or function. This entry uses the pager less(1); if you want to use a different pager, use its name instead:

showpart: -nomoreproc -moreproc less -nopause -form /dev/null -part

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This file is from the third edition of the book MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, ISBN 1-56592-093-7, by Jerry Peek. Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995 by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. This file is freely-available; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. For more information, see the file copying.htm.