Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> writes:
I don't remember all the places I looked and things I tried, nor do I
remember the order in which I did them. But here are some of the things I
tried:
man attach
man -k attach
man whatnow (It told me the feature existed, but not much more)
man nmh (to see if there was a relevant man page)
man send (lots of hits for "attach" but nothing about the attach
command)
So I guess this is partially the fault of the way nmh works; whatnow does
some things (and implements the "attach" command) but the real mechanics
are handled by "send". Sure, once you KNOW that what attach does is add
a special header, the information in the send man page makes more sense.
In my humble (but correct :-) opinion there should be an attach
man page. It would, at the very least give the basic idea, (attach
generates certain headers which send understands), the syntax of the
command, and pointers to other man pages.
See, I'm not so sure about that. It's not a new command that happens
at the shell prompt;
Maybe there shouldn't be a separate attach man page, but that doesn't seem like
a
compelling reason, It just says that it shouldn't be in man/man1 but possibly
man/man7, See man 7 intro.
Instead of saying what information should be in what man pages, and what man
pages should exist, let me opine a desideratum:
Granted that what goes on under the hood (relationship of attach to send etc.)
needs documentation, there ought to be documentation for the user-clod like me,
who sees the attach facility as a separate entity. It should include such things
as: (these are examples)
The syntax of attach: multiple files, escapes etc. (David, isn't this
already more than one paragraph?)
Recipients will only see base names of the arguments to attach
Extension names are case insensitive.
What happens if a file has an unrecognized extension
...
All of this might be obvious to you, but it wasn't to me. And a lot of it
probably still isn't.
Lest my griping mask my pleasure with the attach facility, let me make it clear
that I'm delighted by it.
Very naive, stupid question: Why wasn't attach implemented as a shell level
command. Don't need to know, just curious.
Norman Shapiro
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