Re: [bug-mailutils] pick missing the "--" feature for matching arbitrary components

[Joe Brenner]

Joe Brenner <address@hidden> wrote:

> I have a number of shell scripts that do mail refiling in the
> traditional "mh" way, where I often do things like this:
>
>   refile `pick +inbox \
>         -from           address@hidden \
>     -or -to             address@hidden \
>     -or --apparently-to address@hidden \
>   ` +BALUG
>
> The Gnu utils version of pick does not seem to know what to
> make of something like "--apparently-to", it gives me the
> error:
>
>   pick: unrecognized option `--apparently-to'
>
> With nmh, the double hyphen indicates you're matching a mail
> header field (aka a "component") with some arbitrary name, in
> this case: "Apparently-to:"

At long last I have access to the mailutils info (I built it from
scratch, just to get this... it doesn't seem to ship with the Ubuntu
mailutils packages for some reason), and I see that this is called
a "non-standard extension" (there are standards for mh?) and is
considered deprecated.  However:

  It is recognized only if 'pick' is called from within another
  program, so that existing application continue to work.

And that is indeed what I'm doing, calling pick from within an
already existing shell script.