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Re: Formail: what is the +skip option for and why?

2006-09-29 21:46:56
Steve,

I an redoing some older scripts, and I don't understand why I have a +1
in the formail statement.  With or without, the answer is the same - so
what is it used for?

[sda(_at_)beaujolais ~]$ formail -X'From ' -cs < $HOME/mail/junk | wc -l
      126
[sda(_at_)beaujolais ~]$ formail +1 -X'From ' -cs < $HOME/mail/junk | wc -l
      126

Seee the formail(1) man page.  With -s, +# means to skip the first # 
split-out messages and omit them from the output.

Since both results were 126, I see two possibilities:

1. What formail sees as the first split-out message in the file is 
something that doesn't have a From_ postmark (though wouldn't the 
absence of -f add one?), or
2. a 127th message was added to the file between the two attempts.

Try this:

  formail -1s < $HOME/mail/junk

and see what comes out.

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