Ubuntu Manpage: mhshow - display nmh MIME messages

NAME

       mhshow - display nmh MIME messages

SYNOPSIS

       mhshow [-help] [-version] [+folder] [msgs] [-file file] [-part number] ...  [-type content] ...  [-prefer
            content] ...  [-noprefer] [-concat | -noconcat] [-textonly | -notextonly] [-inlineonly |
            -noinlineonly] [-header | -noheader] [-form formfile] [-markform formfile] [-rcache policy] [-wcache
            policy] [-check | -nocheck]

DESCRIPTION

The mhshow command displays contents of a MIME (multi-media) message, or collection of messages.

mhshow manipulates multi-media messages as specified in RFC 2045 to RFC 2049. Currently mhshow only
supports encodings in message bodies, and does not support the encoding of message headers as specified
in RFC 2047.

By default, mhshow will display only the text parts of a message that are not marked as attachments.
This behavior can be changed by the -notextonly and -noinlineonly switches. In addition, by using the
-part, -type, and -prefer switches, you may limit and reorder the set of parts to be displayed, based on
part number and/or content type. The inclusion of any -part or -type switches will override the default
settings of -textonly and -inlineonly.

The -header switch controls whether mhshow will print a message separator header before each message that
it displays. The header format can be controlled using -headerform, to specify a file containing
mh-format(5) instructions. A copy of the built-in default headerform can be found in
/etc/nmh/mhshow.header, for reference. In addition to the normal set of mh-format(5) instructions, a
"%{folder}" escape provides a string representing the current folder.

By default, mhshow will concatenate all content under one pager. If you want each part to be displayed
separately, you can override the default behavior with -noconcat.

The -file file switch directs mhshow to use the specified file as the source message, rather than a
message from a folder. If you specify this file as “-”, then mhshow will accept the source message on
the standard input. Note that the file, or input from standard input, should be a validly formatted
message, just like any other nmh message. It should not be in mail drop format (to convert a file in
mail drop format to a folder of nmh messages, see inc(1)).

The -part switch can be given (one or more times) to restrict the set of subparts that will be displayed.
(Obviously with no -part switches, all parts will be considered.) If a -part switch specifies a specific
subpart (i.e., a "leaf" in the tree of MIME parts), then that part will always be displayed. If a -part
switch references a multipart/alternative part, then (in the absence of a -type switch) only the default
subpart of that multipart will be displayed.

A part specification consists of a series of numbers separated by dots. For example, in a multipart
content containing three parts, these would be named as 1, 2, and 3, respectively. If part 2 was also a
multipart content containing two parts, these would be named as 2.1 and 2.2, respectively. Note that the
-part switch is effective only for messages containing a multipart content. If a message has some other
kind of content, or if the part is itself another multipart content, the -part switch will not prevent
the content from being acted upon.

The -type switch can also be used to restrict (or, when used in conjunction with -part, to further
restrict) the display of parts according to content type. One or more -type switches part will only
select the first match from a multipart/alternative, even if there is more than one subpart that matches
(one of) the given content type(s).

Using either -part or -type switches alone will cause either switch to select the part(s) they match.
Using them together will select only the part(s) matched by both (sets of) switches. In other words, the
result is the intersection, and not the union, of their separate match results.

A content specification consists of a content type and a subtype. The initial list of “standard” content
types and subtypes can be found in RFC 2046.

A list of commonly used contents is briefly reproduced here:

Type Subtypes
---- --------
text plain, enriched
multipart mixed, alternative, digest, parallel
message rfc822, partial, external-body
application octet-stream, postscript
image jpeg, gif, png
audio basic
video mpeg

A legal MIME message must contain a subtype specification.

To specify a content, regardless of its subtype, just use the name of the content, e.g., “audio”. To
specify a specific subtype, separate the two with a slash, e.g., “audio/basic”. Note that regardless of
the values given to the -type switch, a multipart content (of any subtype listed above) is always acted
upon. Further note that if the -type switch is used, and it is desirable to act on a message/external-
body content, then the -type switch must be used twice: once for message/external-body and once for the
content externally referenced.

In the absence of -prefer, mhshow will select the "best" displayable subpart from multipart/alternative
content. The -prefer switch can be used (one or more times, in order of ascending preference) to let MH
know which content types from a multipart/alternative MIME part are preferred by the user, in order to
override the default selection for display. For example, mail is often sent containing both plaintext
and HTML-formatted versions of the same content, and the HTML version is usually indicated to be the
"best" format for viewing. Using “-prefer text/plain” will cause the plaintext version to be displayed
if possible, but still allow display of the HTML part if there is no plaintext subpart available. Using
“-prefer text/plain -prefer image/png” would add a preference for PNG images, which might or might not
ever appear in the same multipart/alternative section with text/plain. Implementation note: RFC 2046
requires that the subparts of a multipart/alternative be ordered according to "faithfulness to the
original content", and MH by default selects the subpart ranked most "faithful" by that ordering. The
-prefer switch reorders the alternative parts (only internally, never changing the message file) to move
the user's preferred part(s) to the "most faithful" position. Thus, when viewed by mhlist, the ordering
of multipart/alternative parts will appear to change when invoked with or without various -prefer
switches. Since the last of multiple -prefer options "wins", a -prefer on the command line will override
any in a profile entry.

The -noprefer switch will cancel any previous -prefer switches.

Unseen Sequence
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.

Checking the Contents
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.

Showing the Contents
The headers of each message are displayed with the mhlproc (usually mhl), using the standard format file,
mhl.headers. You may specify an alternative 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. Similarly, 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>

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>

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
%{parameter} Insert the parameter value from the Content-Type field
%f Insert filename containing content
%F %f, and stdin is terminal not content
%l display listing prior to displaying content
%s Insert content subtype
%d Insert content description
%% Insert the character %

mhshow will execute at most one display string at any given time, and wait for the current display string
to finish execution before executing the next display string.

The {parameter} escape is typically used in a command line argument that should only be present if it has
a non-null value. It is highly recommended that the entire escape be wrapped in double quotes. Shell
parameter expansion can construct the argument only when it is non-null, e.g.,

mhshow-show-text/html: charset="%{charset}";
w3m ${charset:+-I $charset} -T text/html %F

That example also shows the use of indentation to signify continuation: the two text lines combine to
form a single entry. Note that when dealing with text that has been converted internally by iconv(3),
the “charset” parameter will reflect the target character set of the text, rather than the original
character set in the message.

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. Furthermore, stdin is
not redirected from the terminal to the content.

If a display string is not found, mhshow behaves as if these profile entries were supplied and supported:

mhshow-show-text/plain: %lmoreproc %F
mhshow-show-message/rfc822: %lshow -file %F

Note that “moreproc” is not supported in user profile display strings.

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

If an f- or F-escape is not quoted with single quotes, its expansion will be wrapped with single quotes.

Finally, mhshow will process each message serially -- it won't start showing the next message until all
the commands executed to display the current message have terminated.

Showing Alternate Character Sets
If mhshow was built with iconv(3), then all text/plain parts of the message(s) will be displayed using
the character set of the current locale. See the mhparam(1) man page for how to determine whether your
nmh installation includes iconv(3) support. To convert text parts other than text/plain, or if mhshow
was not built with iconv, an external program can be used, as described next.

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. mhshow
checks this by examining the current character set defined by the locale(1) environment variables. If
the value of the locale character set is equal to the value of the charset parameter, then mhshow assumes
it can display this content without any additional setup. If the locale is not set properly, 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

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. For example, messages
encoded in the ISO-8859-1 character set can be viewed using less, with these environment variable
settings:

LESSCHARSET latin1
LESS -f

The first setting tells less to use the ISO-8859-1 definition to determine whether a character is
“normal”, “control“, or “binary”. The second setting 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.)

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

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

• afs

• anon-ftp

• ftp

• local-file

• mail-server

• url

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.

For the “url” access-type, mhshow will look for the “nmh-access-url” profile entry. See mhstore(1) for
more details.

The Content Cache
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 publicly-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).

User Environment
Because the display environment in which mhshow operates may vary for different machines, mhshow will
look for the environment variable MHSHOW. 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

/etc/nmh/mhn.defaults

which is created automatically during nmh installation.

See "Profile Lookup" in mh-profile(5) for the profile search order, and for how duplicate entries are
treated.

Content-Type Marker
mhshow will display a marker containing information about the part being displayed next. The default
marker can be changed using the -markform switch to specify a file containing mh-format(5) instructions
to use when displaying the content marker. A copy of the default markform can be found in
/etc/nmh/mhshow.marker, for reference. In addition to the normal set of mh-format(5) instructions, the
following component escapes are supported:

Escape Returns Description
part string MIME part number
content-type string MIME Content-Type of part
description string Content-Description header
disposition string Content disposition (attachment or inline)
ctype-<PARAM> string Value of <PARAM> from Content-Type header
cdispo-<PARAM> string Value of <PARAM> from
Content-Disposition header
%(size) integer The size of the decoded part, in bytes
%(unseen) boolean Returns true for suppressed parts
In this context, the %(unseen) function indicates whether mhshow has decided to not display a
particular part due to the -textonly or -inlineonly switches.
All MIME parameters and the “Content-Description” header will have RFC 2231 decoding applied and be
converted to the local character set.

FILES

       mhshow looks for all format files and mhn.defaults in multiple locations: absolute pathnames are accessed
       directly, tilde expansion is done on usernames, and files are searched for in the user's Mail  directory,
       as specified in their profile.  If not found there, the directory “/etc/nmh” is checked.

       $HOME/.mh_profile          The user profile
       $MHSHOW                    Additional profile entries
       /etc/nmh/mhn.defaults      System default MIME profile entries
       /etc/nmh/mhl.headers       The headers template
       /etc/nmh/mhshow.marker     Example content marker
       /etc/nmh/mhshow.header     Example message separator header

PROFILE COMPONENTS

       Path:                To determine the user's nmh directory
       Current-Folder:      To find the default current folder
       Unseen-Sequence:     To name sequences denoting unseen messages
       mhlproc:             Default program to display message headers
       nmh-access-ftp:      Program to retrieve contents via FTP
       nmh-access-url:      Program to retrieve contents via HTTP
       nmh-cache            Public directory to store cached external contents
       nmh-private-cache    Personal directory to store cached external contents
       mhshow-charset-<charsTe>mplate for environment to render character sets
       mhshow-show-<type>*  Template for displaying contents
       moreproc:            Default program to display text/plain content

DEFAULTS

       `+folder' defaults to the current folder
       `msgs' defaults to cur
       `-nocheck'
       `-concat'
       `-textonly'
       `-inlineonly'
       `-form mhl.headers'
       `-rcache ask'
       `-wcache ask'

CONTEXT

       If  a  folder  is  given,  it  will become the current folder.  The last message selected will become the
       current message.