[15132] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 8.0K: mark
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Barker)
Wed May 7 18:10:42 1997
To: Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 07 May 1997 18:10:26 EDT
From: Mike Barker <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Hi.
I think perhaps you are confused about what the man page is saying:
The current restrictions on sequences are:
The name used to denote a message sequence must consist of an alpha-
betic character followed by zero or more alphanumeric characters, and
can not be one of the "reserved" message names (e.g., "first", "cur",
and so forth).
Only a certain number of sequences may be defined for a given folder.
This number is usually limited to 26 (10 on small systems).
Message ranges with user-defined sequence names are restricted to the
form "name:n" or "name:-n", and refer to the first or last `n' mes-
sages of the sequence `name', respectively. Constructs of the form
"name1-name2" are forbidden.
As I read this, it is specifically saying that when you create a
sequence, it cannot be one of the reserved message names. For
example, you cannot make "cur" equal to messages 13, 15, and 17 - it
is always the last accessed message.
You might take a look at the man page mh-sequence for more details. Pick
also can be used for setting sequences.
However, for your specific purpose (changing the last accessed message
or "cur" setting), the man page explanation is confusing because it is
talking about the ordinary usage of mark to create new sequences.
Interestingly, "cur" appears to be a special case. As you point out,
athena% mark 81 -seq cur
athena% mark
cur: 81
works fine, but
athena% show 90 > /dev/null
athena% mark
cur: 90
athena% mark 81 -seq first
mark: illegal sequence name: first
athena% mark 81 -seq last
mark: illegal sequence name: last
however, as you point out, "cur" can be set to a single value using
mark. Mark does NOT allow setting it to multiple messages like other
sequences, though.
Thank you for using Athena.
Mike Barker
Team Leader, Team Athena
