On Nov 11, 2014, at 5:24 AM, Ralph Corderoy <ralph(_at_)inputplus(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk> wrote:
That is, the directory- and file-structure of UNIX is used directly. As a result, any UNIX file-handling command can be applied to any message.
And that was written in a land where email was unstructured 7-bit ASCII text. For better or worse, we have moved on. But even in today's world, I could probably get 95% of the way back to the glory days if MH message files were stored on disk (1) in a decoded format (undo q-p and base64 for all text/* parts), and (2) all charset encoded text canonicalized to utf-8 (including the headers, in violation of the specs). With that as a base, I could hack my usual text processing tools to use Pike's structural regular expressions[1] instead of the POSIX ones. SREs have the ability to match across multiple lines of text, so you can do things like match on an entire MIME subpart and back-reference against just the contents. Incredibly powerful. --lyndon [1] See http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/87/3-se.ps.gz for Pike's introduction to SREs, and http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/sam/sam.html for some examples of their use in the Sam editor.
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