daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Henry Mensch)
Tue Sep 20 11:08:05 1988
To: rlk@THINK.COM
Cc: mar@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 88 11:06:42 EDT
From: Henry Mensch <henry@GARP.MIT.EDU>
in response to your bug report, i imagine a program like this would
have satisfied your need. comments regarding this program to mark
rosenstein directly; i'll send your message to the SMS people
separately.
-- henry
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From: <mar@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
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To: staff@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: sms-dev@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Subject: new program for manipulating lists
Play-Safe: it could save your life
For those of you who manage lists in SMS, there is a new program in
addition to listmaint that you may find easier to use. Vax & RT
binaries and a man page have been installed in the smsuser locker.
-Mark Rosenstein
BLANCHE(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual BLANCHE(1)
NAME
blanche - examine and modify memberships in SMS lists
SYNOPSIS
blanche [options] listname [options]
DESCRIPTION
Blanche is a tool for maintaining the membership of SMS
lists. It is more limited than the menu-oriented listmaint,
but has a more traditional unix user interface which makes
it easier to use in scripts. It can also read a set of list
members from a file and synchronize the list in SMS to that
file.
Whenever a member is specified, it may be specified expli-
citly, as user:username, list:listname, or
string:string_text; or the type may be left off if the
member name is non ambiguous. A member having punctuation
characters (such as at-sign) in it is immediately assumed to
be a string. Otherwise, blanche will try first as a user,
and if that fails will try the member as a list, and finally
fall back to string if both of those fail.
The default output mode is similar, in that usernames are
displayed without any identifying type, lists are always
displayed as list:listname, and strings will only be labeled
as a string if they do not have any punctuation characters
in them.
OPTIONS
-add member or -a member:
This will add the specified member to the target list.
This option may be specified multiple times with dif-
ferent members on the same command line.
-delete member or -d member:
This will delete the specified member from the target
list. This option may be specified multiple times with
different members on the same command line.
-file filename or -f filename:
This will read a list of members from the named file,
and make those members be the membership of the target
list. It will do this by extracting the current
membership of the target list from SMS, then diff these
two sets of members, and determine who has to be added
and deleted from the list so it will match the contents
of the file.
The file contains one member per line. It may have
blank lines. Anything following a semicolon is con-
sidered a comment. If the filename is "-", blanche
Printed 9/16/88 14 Sep 1988 1
BLANCHE(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual BLANCHE(1)
will read from standard input.
-info or -i:
Display other information about the target list besides
the membership. This includes the description, flags,
maillist and group status, owner, and last modifica-
tion.
-members or -m:
Display the membership of the target list. This is the
default if no other options are specified.
-recursive or -r:
When displaying the membership of the target list,
recursively track down all lists which are members of
the target, and get their membership. Only the user
and string members will be displayed, not the inter-
mediate lists.
-verbose or -v:
Give more information. With the info flag, it will
also display the number of members on the list. With
the members flag, it will display the type of each
member, not just those that are ambiguous. When chang-
ing the membership of a list, it will print a message
for each member added or deleted.
-debug or -D:
Turn on debugging messages.
AUTHORS
Mark Rosenstein and Jay Berkenbilt.
SEE ALSO
listmaint(1)
Printed 9/16/88 14 Sep 1988 2
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