🚀 go-pugleaf

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