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Scripting

Comments

The # character introduces an end-of-line comment. All characters until and including the end of line are ignored.

Displaying arbitrary text

The echo (ec) command prints its arguments to stdout.

Sourcing external command files

The command source filename reads commands from the named file. Its minimal abbreviation is so.

Setting and unsetting the variables.

The mail variables may be set using set (se) command. The command takes a list of assignments. The syntax of an assignment is

name=string

Assign a string value to the variable. If string contains whitespace characters it must be enclosed in a pair of double-quote characters (")

name=number

Assign a numeric value to the variable.

name

Assign boolean True value.

noname

Assign boolean False value.

Example:

& set askcc nocrt indentprefix="> "

This statement sets askcc to True, crt to False, and indentprefix to "> ".

To unset mail variables use unset(uns) command. The command takes a list of variable names to unset.

Example: To undo the effect of the previous example, do:

& unset askcc crt indentprefix

Setting and unsetting shell environment variables.

Shell environment may be modified using setenv (sete) command. The command takes a list of assignments. The syntax of an assignment is:

name=value

If variable name does not already exist in the environment, then it is added to the environment with the value value. If name does exist, then its value in the environment is changed to value.

name

Delete the variable name from the environment ("unset" it).

Conditional statements

The conditional statement allows to execute a set of mail commands depending on the mode the mail program is in. The conditional statement is:

if cond
...
else
...
endif

where ... represents the set of commands to be executed in each branch of the statement. cond can be one of the following:

s

True if mail is operating in mail sending mode.

r

True if mail is operating in mail reading mode.

t

True if stdout is a terminal device (as opposed to a regular file).

The conditional statements can be nested to arbitrary depth. The minimal abbreviations for if, else and endif commands are i, el and en.

Example:

if t
set crt prompt="& "
else
unset prompt
endif
if s
alt [email protected] [email protected]
set