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RE: help with scoring & size condition

2003-01-13 11:53:00
David W. Tamkin vouchsafed ("vouchsaved"?) to utter:

People seem to be saying that the procmailsc(5) man page has 
an example of this form:

 * anumber^0 > anothernumber

which is supposed to score anumber if the message is bigger 
than anothernumber bytes and score zero otherwise.  [Of course, 
it doesn't work that way: unless anothernumber is 0 (which would 
cause an overflow), that condition is guaranteed to score 1 point 
no matter.]

Well, I'll confess that I belong to the mass of people colored
confused by How It Works.  And your bracketed commented made a light 
or two go off in my head, for which, thanks.  But why do you write
"of course," when there seem to be such scant few who have an
inkling about how it really is supposed to work?  I, for one,
would be most appreciative if you'd elucidate your sidebar comment
further.

In any case, as I said, your bracketed words did make me see
some things I'd missed.


Well, I'm sorry, folks, but I don't see any weighted size 
conditions in that man page where x=0 [. . . .]  I can understand 
coming up with that misconception by guesswork, but I do not 
see why people are blaming the manual pages.

I don't know that anybody said the man pages had an x=0 example.
What there is, is

        * -100^3   > 2000

So, as you see, x-3.  I just tried that, and I can get it to
work, though I don't yet fully understand the mechanism.  As
for why people blame the manual, well, while one normally does
expect terseness from Unix man pages, uh . . . there's terse,
and then there's *terse*.  If you know what I mean.

I'll put on my to-do list to reread `man procmailsc' (again)
this week.

---
dman (looking forward to any further elucidation you care to
succor us poor plebes with, David)


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