Re: [Nmh-workers] Conjectures about whom

[Ken Hornstein]

>I am thinking about writing a postproc, using Ken Hornstein's example as a
>template (though I will probably use Java rather than bash). It will invoke
>whom and examine its output. I can find no documentation about whom's
>non-error output format. Here is my conjecture about it.

As an aside: now that I look at the code, I realize that post (which really
does the work for whom(1)), opens /dev/null and writes the headers to it.
Boy, once you know how the sausage is made ...

>Each output line (I don't particularly care how lines are delimited) is
>exactly one of:
>
>     A string beginning with zero or more white space characters followed by a
>     '-'
>
>     A string containing exactly one address as a substring.
>
>Is this conjecture true? If so, can I count on it remaining true?

You can also have an address followed by [BCC].  Also, the address (for
dumb historical reasons) is printed as "user at domain".  You can also
in theory have a UUCP address (host!user) but you would have to work
to make that happen, and I don't think you'd actually be able to send it
anywhere if you did.  You can also have a "local" address which has
no @ or at.

I don't think we can make any guarantees on the format of that output;
for example, it might change to being simply address@hidden  Also, getting
rid of the distinction between local and network users might make sense,
but that would require some more thought.  I would simply display the
output to the user and check the exit value.

--Ken