Re: [Nmh-workers] Relative Message Numbers

[David Levine]

Norm wrote:

> If foobar is a message sequence then something like forbar+3, for
> the third message of foobar, would make my life a bit easier.
>
> Even better, would be to allow forbar+3,4 and foobar
> forbar+3-5. Then, recursively, and perhaps a bit fancifully, since
> forbar+3-5 is a message sequence, forbar+3-5+2 would be
> meaningful. If foobar has had a least four messages it would denote
> the fourth messages of foobar.

I agree with Robert and Ken.

The shell function below is another way to handle the simple
case:  pn forbar 3 4

Or, load each of the message numbers into a bash array and do
all kinds of fancy things with those.

I just don't think that native support would be useful enough
to justify the complexity.

David


# first argument is sequence name
# second argument is n'th message of sequence
# optional third argument is number of messages, default 1
function pn {
  pick $1 | tail -n +$2 | head -${3:-1}
}