Reading the pangea msgs bulletin board from a pangea shell login
Last revision July 22, 2004
If you regularly connect to pangea for
command-line shell logins, you may find it easier to read the pangea msgs
bulletin board with the Unix msgs program. This program keeps track
of which messages you have already read, and only presents the new ones, in order.
It is even possible to have every message posted to pangea msgs
automatically forwarded
to you via email, although you may find that this clutters up your
email "inbox". Contact the
pangea system manager
to set that up.
To read pangea msgs bulletin board from a pangea command-line login, just
type the command:
msgs
You will be presented with the subject of each message, the number of lines,
and a prompt.
Reply with a
y
to read the message, an
n
to skip it, or a
q
to quit the
msgs
program for now.
The
msgs
program keeps track of which messages you have read.
Each time you run it,
msgs
updates the value (ordinal number) of the latest message you have
"processed" (either read or deliberately skipped) in a file named
.msgsrc
in your home directory. The next time you run
msgs,
it starts with the next higher numbered (later) message.
This way, it does not show you old messages again.
It even notifies you at login if there are new, unread messages.
Rarely, the
msgs
program may lose track of which messages you have read or stop
showing you new ones.
You can
fix that
by editing the
.msgsrc
file directly.
Other useful options for the msgs command:
- If you want to go back and see old messages that you have already read or
skipped, you can request a specific message number, or go back a specified number
of messages, by adding a numeric option when you start msgs, for
example,
msgs 326
asks msgs to start with message number 326.
msgs -3
asks msgs to back up three messages before the last one you saw and
start again there.
- The -p command line option is used when you start msgs
to make it use the more
program to control scrolling of long messages. This is the default
setting on Pangea; you do not have to specify it to get scroll control. On other
systems where this is not the default, you may want to use msgs -p
to start the program, or create your own alias.
- While reading messages, if you want to save a copy of the current message
to disk, you can reply with s to the msgs yes/no prompt
for a specific message. It will be added to the end of the file Messages
in the current directory.
- Alternatively, if you reply m to the msgs yes/no
prompt for a specific message, it will put a copy of the current message in a
temporary electronic mail box and invoke the Unix mail program to
read that mail box. This gives you all the options of the mail program
for reading, responding to, or filing the message. If you use some other mail
reading program, such as pine, then this will not help you; it only
works with the program mail. When you quit the mail
program, you are back in msgs again.
