🚀 go-pugleaf

mendez@taliesin.greco-prog.fr (Marc Mendez) wrote in
<1993Jan21.183512.26171@greco-prog.fr>:

| I would like to uudecode files I receive by mail. But I need to keep
| the order of the files (which is not respected all the time in the mail
| list). Can I tag files in the order I want and then uudecode them
| (with a pipe, I suppose) ? If yes, how ?

First, there should be no need to uudecode the files in any particular order.
The "begin" header of a uuencode gives the name that the uudecoded file will
have, and if the uuencodes were part of a single distribution every single
one will have a unique name in its "begin" header for the uudecoded version
of its own contents.

Second, tagging and piping won't work with uudecode.  It's not Elm's fault:
it's uudecode's problem.  If you tag and pipe, Elm assembles a text of all
tagged messages (in the order of the current display) separated by a row of
hyphens between each two messages and pipes that to one invocation of the
program you specify.  uudecode sees the "end" directive at the bottom of the
first message, exits, and ignores the rest of the pipe.  There is no provision 
in the uuencode standard for "next" or "continue" to mean 'close off the file
you've been writing but look for another file's "begin" line coming up.'

formail, which is part of the procmail distribution, can split up a pipe or
an input file into separate messages.  I take care of the task by tagging the
messages and piping them to formail -s uudecode.

David W. Tamkin   Box 59297   Northtown Station, Illinois  60659-0297
dattier@ddsw1.mcs.com    CompuServe: 73720,1570    MCI Mail: 426-1818