Mark Miller followed up,
| And to put a number on the extent of my experience, what is a thrower and
| LDA?
A mail thrower is a user-invoked device to handle incoming email; procmail is
a very good example. "LDA" stands for "local delivery agent" and is the
program that the MTA (mail transport agent) uses to pass incoming mail to
users; procmail can do that too.
| Could you elaborate a bit on the f flag? The man page says
| f Consider the pipe a filter
|
| but what exactly does that mean?
It means filter the text through the command and use the results ... in other
words, replace the text of the message with the output of the command as
procmail goes on trying remaining recipes. If you want to filter the head
and leave the body alone, use the `h' flag with `f'; to filter the body and
leave the head alone, use `b' with `f'. Using both or neither with `f' will
filter the entire message.
| And to nitpick a bit, what does the h flag accomplish? The man page says
| that it is a default flag- does its use prevent the pipe from filtering
| the body (and thus minimizing processing time)?
Yes, precisely. `h' can be thought of as "ignore the body" (lose it on a
save or leave it alone on a filter) and `b' as "ignore the head"; if you look
at them that way, then if you use both together they cancel each other.
| Thanks,
You're welcome; good luck.