Re: sortm error analysis

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Dave,

> Running sortm on a folder with about 6000 messages, sortm reports "can't
> parse date field" on two messages.  I've added -verbose but have no clue
> to what is wrong with the date field on those messages.
...
>     Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2022 06:47:55 -0400
>     Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2022 03:49:19 -0700

If I create a couple of emails here and replace their Date fields with
those values then they scan and sortm fine, so that's odd.

    $ scan -forma '%(tws{date})  %(pretty{date})' 1 2
    Wed, 21 Sep 2022 06:47:55 -0400  Wed, 21 Sep 2022 06:47:55 -0400
    Wed, 21 Sep 2022 03:49:19 -0700  Wed, 21 Sep 2022 03:49:19 -0700
    $
    $ sortm -verbose 1 2
    sorting by datefield date
    $
    $ mv 1 3
    $ sortm -verbose 2 3
    sorting by datefield date
    renaming message chain from 3 to 2
    message 2 becomes message 3
    $ 

Does the above scan command work with your emails?

> There are no hidden characters or trailing whitespace.

To be sure, can you give us the output of this command, changing the
message numbers 2 and 3 to be your two problem emails.

    $ cd `mhpath`
    $ grep -ib '^[[:space:]]*date[[:space:]]*:' 2 3 | sed -n l
    2:389:Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 16:10:20 +0000$
    3:1426:Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 18:27:11 -0500$
    $ 

What's the output of ‘sortm -version’.

Perhaps the problem is not with those fields, but some internal
corruption of them by the time they're being processed, which is why
grep has -b above.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.