If the profile entry “Unseen-Sequence” is present and non-empty, then mhshow will remove each of the messages shown from each sequence named by the profile entry.

The -check switch tells mhshow to check each content for an integrity checksum. If a content has such a checksum (specified as a Content-MD5 header field), then mhshow will attempt to verify the integrity of the content.

The headers of each message are displayed with the mhlproc (usually mhl), using the standard format file mhl.headers. You may specify an alternate format file with the -form formfile switch. If the format file mhl.null is specified, then the display of the message headers is suppressed.

Next, the contents are extracted from the message and are stored in a temporary file. Usually, the name of the temporary file is the word “mhshow” followed by a string of characters. Occasionally, the method used to display a content (described next), requires that the file end in a specific suffix. For example, the soffice command (part of the StarOffice package) can be used to display Microsoft Word content, but it uses the suffix to determine how to display the file. If no suffix is present, the file is not correctly loaded. Similarily, older versions of the gs command append a “.ps” suffix to the filename if one was missing. As a result, these cannot be used to read the default temporary file.

To get around this, your profile can contain lines of the form:

mhshow-suffix-<type>/<subtype>: <suffix>

or

mhshow-suffix-<type>: <suffix>

to specify a suffix which can be automatically added to the temporary file created for a specific content type. For example, the following lines might appear in your profile:

mhshow-suffix-text: .txt
mhshow-suffix-application/msword: .doc
mhshow-suffix-application/PostScript: .ps

to automatically append a suffix to the temporary files.

The method used to display the different contents in the messages bodies will be determined by a “display string”. To find the display string, mhshow will first search your profile for an entry of the form:

mhshow-show-<type>/<subtype>

to determine the display string. If this isn't found, mhshow will search for an entry of the form:

mhshow-show-<type>

to determine the display string.

If a display string is found, any escapes (given below) will be expanded. The result will be executed under “/bin/sh”, with the standard input set to the content.

The display string may contain the following escapes:

%a	Insert parameters from Content-Type field
%e	exclusive execution
%f	Insert filename containing content
%F	%e, %f, and stdin is terminal not content
%l	display listing prior to displaying content
%p	%l, and ask for confirmation
%s	Insert content subtype
%d	Insert content description
%%	Insert the character %

For those display strings containing the e- or F-escape, mhshow will execute at most one of these at any given time. Although the F-escape expands to be the filename containing the content, the e-escape has no expansion as far as the shell is concerned.

When the p-escape prompts for confirmation, typing INTR (usually control-C) will tell mhshow not to display that content. The p-escape can be disabled by specifying the switch -nopause. Further, when mhshow is display a content, typing QUIT (usually control-\) will tell mhshow to wrap things up immediately.

Note that if the content being displayed is multipart, but not one of the subtypes listed above, then the f- and F-escapes expand to multiple filenames, one for each subordinate content. Further, stdin is not redirected from the terminal to the content.

If a display string is not found, mhshow has several default values:

mhshow-show-text/plain: %pmoreproc '%F'
mhshow-show-message/rfc822: %pshow -file '%F'

If a subtype of type text doesn't have a profile entry, it will be treated as text/plain.

mhshow has default methods for handling multipart messages of subtype mixed, alternative, parallel, and digest. Any unknown subtype of type multipart (without a profile entry), will be treated as multipart/mixed.

If none of these apply, then mhshow will check to see if the message has an application/octet-stream content with parameter “type=tar”. If so, mhshow will use an appropriate command. If not, mhshow will complain.

Example entries might be:

mhshow-show-audio/basic: raw2audio 2>/dev/null | play
mhshow-show-image: xv '%f'
mhshow-show-application/PostScript: lpr -Pps

Note that when using the f- or F-escape, it's a good idea to use single-quotes around the escape. This prevents misinterpretation by the shell of any funny characters that might be present in the filename.

Finally, mhshow will process each message serially0--0it won't start showing the next message until all the commands executed to display the current message have terminated. In the case of a multipart content (of any subtype listed above), the content contains advice indicating if the parts should be displayed serially or in parallel. Because this may cause confusion, particularly on uni-window displays, the -serialonly switch can be given to tell mhshow to never display parts in parallel.

Because a content of type text might be in a non-ASCII character set, when mhshow encounters a “charset” parameter for this content, it checks if your terminal can display this character set natively. mhn checks this by examining the the environment variable $MM_CHARSET. If the value of this environment variable is equal to the value of the charset parameter, then mhshow assumes it can display this content without any additional setup. If this environment variable is not set, mhshow will assume a value of “US-ASCII”. If the character set cannot be displayed natively, then mhshow will look for an entry of the form:

mhshow-charset-<charset>

which should contain a command creating an environment to render the character set. This command string should containing a single “%s”, which will be filled-in with the command to display the content.

Example entries might be:

mhshow-charset-iso-8859-1: xterm -fn '-*-*-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-c-*-iso8859-*' -e %s

or

mhshow-charset-iso-8859-1: '%s'

The first example tells mhshow to start xterm and load the appropriate character set for that message content. The second example tells mhshow that your pager (or other program handling that content type) can handle that character set, and that no special processing is needed beforehand.

Note that many pagers strip off the high-order bit or have problems displaying text with the high-order bit set. However, the pager less has support for single-octet character sets. The source to less is available on many ftp sites carrying free software. In order to view messages sent in the ISO-8859-1 character set using less,

put these lines in your .login file:

setenv LESSCHARSET latin1
setenv LESS "-f"

The first line tells less to use the ISO-8859-1 definition for determining whether a character is “normal”, “control“, or “binary”. The second line tells less not to warn you if it encounters a file that has non-ASCII characters. Then, simply set the moreproc profile entry to less, and it will get called automatically. (To handle other single-octet character sets, look at the less(1) manual entry for information about the $LESSCHARDEF environment variable.)

mhshow cannot directly display messages of type partial. You must reassemble them first into a normal message using mhstore. Check the man page for mhstore(1) for details.

For contents of type message/external-body, mhshow supports these access-types:

•

afs

•

anon-ftp

•

ftp

•

local-file

•

mail-server

For the “anon-ftp” and “ftp” access types, mhshow will look for the “nmh-access-ftp” profile entry, e.g.,

nmh-access-ftp: myftp.sh

to determine the pathname of a program to perform the FTP retrieval.

This program is invoked with these arguments:

domain name of FTP-site
username
password
remote directory
remote filename
local filename
“ascii” or “binary”

The program should terminate with an exit status of zero if the retrieval is successful, and a non-zero exit status otherwise.

If this entry is not provided, then mhshow will use a simple built-in FTP client to perform the retrieval.

When mhshow encounters an external content containing a “Content-ID:” field, and if the content allows caching, then depending on the caching behavior of mhshow, the content might be read from or written to a cache.

The caching behavior of mhshow is controlled with the -rcache and -wcache switches, which define the policy for reading from, and writing to, the cache, respectively. One of four policies may be specified: “public”, indicating that mhshow should make use of a publically-accessible content cache; “private”, indicating that mhshow should make use of the user's private content cache; “never”, indicating that mhshow should never make use of caching; and, “ask”, indicating that mhshow should ask the user.

There are two directories where contents may be cached: the profile entry “nmh-cache” names a directory containing world-readable contents, and, the profile entry “nmh-private-cache” names a directory containing private contents. The former should be an absolute (rooted) directory name.

For example,

nmh-cache: /tmp

might be used if you didn't care that the cache got wiped after each reboot of the system. The latter is interpreted relative to the user's nmh directory, if not rooted, e.g.,

nmh-private-cache: .cache

(which is the default value).

Because the display environment in which mhshow operates may vary for different machines, mhshow will look for the environment variable If present, this specifies the name of an additional user profile which should be read. Hence, when a user logs in on a particular display device, this environment variable should be set to refer to a file containing definitions useful for the given display device. Normally, only entries that deal with the methods to display different content type and subtypes

mhshow-show-<type>/<subtype>
mhshow-show-<type>

need be present in this additional profile. Finally, mhshow will attempt to consult one other additional user profile, e.g.,

/etc/nmh/mhn.defaults

which is created automatically during nmh installation.