Re: [Nmh-workers] proposed patch for shell metacharacter failure in nmh-1.7

[Steven Winikoff]

>The SECOND thing is we now have the ability to place MIME parameters into
>some of those command strings, which are from email messages, which is
>where things are "interesting".  We don't normally do that in anything we
>distribute, I think, but here we have a user that did.

I think this is the key observation, and it stems from the fact that the
original MH predated MIME.

I don't know how most nmh users handle incoming attachments, and part of
my problem is that this isn't really documented anywhere.  MIME handling
improved significantly in 1.6 and even more so in 1.7, but almost all the
online documentation I can find is for 1.4 or older (and in most cases,
*much* older, as in MH 6.8!).

What I'm trying to accomplish is what IMAP provides by default, namely the
ability to see the same messages with the same attachments from more than
one place.  If nmh could adapt to using maildir format all my problems
would just disappear, since there are IMAP servers which also understand
that format -- but that's an entirely different can of particularly ugly
worms, and I'm no more inclined to try to open it than I imagine you are.

But that leaves me wanting to be able to open attachments in MH-formatted
messages from multiple systems, and as of this minute I have something
that already does about 98% of what I'm looking for (and the last 2% is
irrelevant to this discussion, so I won't go into that here).

It's just that what I'm doing works better if I can extract the original
filename for a given attachment, and as you point out that's exactly where
the fun starts.


>My proposal is to simply edit out shell metacharacters (add # and ! like
>David suggested) in those strings.  That seems simple and reasonable to
>me.  Well, maybe replace them with an _ or something.

For what it's worth I'd prefer the "replace them with _" option, but even
without it this would do what I'm looking for.

     - Steven
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___________________________________________________________________________
Steven Winikoff                |
Concordia University           |  Don't use no double negatives.
Montreal, QC, Canada           |
address@hidden   |