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Tutorial series - Pine part I
by Philip S Tellis 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

Making effective use of Pine - I ================================ I decided to start this series with pine, because, along with lynx, it was one of the first Unix programs that I ever used. For this, I thank vsnl for giving students shell accounts, and not full fledged ppp dial-ins. During the course of these tutorials, we will learn how to use pine as an effective mail and news reader, and hopefully increase productivity as well. Some important things to note though, Pine was developed by the University of Washington as a Program for Internet News and Email. Hence the name. Pine could also mean Pine Is Not Elm, but that's a different story altogether. Pine was initially designed for inexperienced users, so if you fall in that category, you have no excuse for not using it. If you're an advanced user, pine has features for you too. One last point before we start using pine. It is not licenced under the GPL. The licence allows you to see the source, and even to modify it, but not to redistribute modified versions of its source. Now, on with the show. To start pine, one would normally type pine at the shell prompt: $ pine This brings you to the main screen. The most important thing you need to know here is, Q is to quit. Now, read what's on screen. The menus are self explanatory, use the cursor keys to move up and down, or just press the access key marked to the left of each command. To get back to this screen from almost anywhere, press M. At the bottom, we have a complete menu that is always available to us. Press O to see some more commands in this list. Now, lets move on to composing mail. Most of you would have figured out how to compose a mail by now, if you didn't already know it. We'll jump straight to advanced compose options. Get into compose mode (you've got to figure this out yourself). While you're in the header section, have a look at the menu at the bottom of the compose screen. Now move down to the body section and see what the menu changes too. In fact, if you look closely, you'll notice the options changing for every header field that you're on. While in header mode, there's one particular entry called `Rich Hdr'. The access key for this command is Ctrl+R. It's actually marked as ^R, because ^ is the common way of denoting a control character. We will use Ctrl+R because we aren't really running short of space. Press Ctrl+R while in the header of your message. If you've ever used mail before, you're certain to have received spam. Ever notice how your address is not included in the header, but the mail still gets to you. Well, you can do something similar through pine, although we don't want to start spamming. The Bcc: header, which shows up after you press Ctrl+R lets you do this. The format is the same as the To: and Cc: fields. You can enter a comma separated list of addresses here, any number of them, and no one will be any wiser. None of the addresses included in the Bcc: field show up in the recipients mail. In fact, there is no Bcc: field in the received mail (Some mail clients and servers are broken, and don't always honour this). We also notice a few other fields called Newsgrps, Fcc and Lcc. Newsgrps is basically a list of newsgroups that you want to post your message to. You'd typically not use both a To, and a Newsgrp, although you can. We won't delve into this too much, because chances are, if you're using a newsgroup, you don't really need this document. Fcc and Lcc are slightly confusing, because they aren't part of standard mail headers. They don't show up on received mail. Actually, they aren't even included in the mail you send. Looking at the default value for Fcc, it's easy to figure out that that's how all mails you send end up in your sent-mail folder. Fcc stands for File Carbon Copy, and is the name of a (mail) folder where sent mail will be saved, *before* it is actually sent. This is important to remember, because if pine cannot write the mail to the Fcc folder, it will not send it. You could delete the entry in the Fcc: field to not save your outgoing mail. We'll see later how to do this permanently. Lcc stands for list carbon copy, and is something unique to pine. It is similar to the Bcc: field, except that one can enter the name of a distribution list here. Pine will expand the addresses in the distribution list in the Lcc: field, and put the name of the list in the To: field. Each person listed in the Lcc: field receives a copy of the mail, but all they see is the name of the list without any of the addresses. We'll see later how to create a distribution list. The next field is Attchmnt, and is where you specify a list of files that you want to attach to your outgoing mail. You can use Ctrl+T to select files from your directory, or type in the file name itself. Files are encoded using Base64 encoding. We don't really need to know what that is, because all mail programs understand it, and will happily decode it for you. What you do need to know, is that base64 encoding will always increase your file's size by 133% (in English, that means that the attached file will be a third larger than the original file). If your file is plain text, and doesn't have any lines longer than about 72-74 characters, it might be a good idea to just paste it in the body of the mail. Which is what we talk about next. Actually, we'll talk about it just after this short note about the subject. The subject field is one of the most important fields as far as the recipient is concerned. It should tell the recipient as much as possible about the mail, while still being less than 40-50 characters in length. Many people read mail selectively based on the subject (especially when they receive a large number of mails), so be sure to always use a meaningful subject in formal correspondence. Now, we come down to the body section. I'm assuming you already know by now how to type your mail. Pasting the contents of a file into the mail body is even easier. Just use Ctrl+R (Yes, the same Ctrl+R, it has a different meaning here). In the body, Ctrl+R stands for Read file, and you've got to give it a file name. You could use Ctrl+T just as in the attachment case above to select a file from your directory, and in really new versions of pine, you could also paste the contents of another message. I'll leave that for you to figure out. That's it for this installment. For now, you should try out the address book feature from the main menu. Add all your friends' and family members' addresses to it. We'll use it the next time. Philip -- The clothes have no emperor. -- C.A.R. Hoare, commenting on ADA. Visit my webpage at http://www.ncst.ernet.in/~philip/ Read my writings at http://www.ncst.ernet.in/~philip/writings/ MSN philiptellis Yahoo! philiptellis

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] Telnet
by noel seq 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

>>Helo Krishnan, >>inetd folder as well as inetd.conf file is not there. I am >>using version >>7.1 >>Thanks >>======================= >>Darshan S. Wakchaure >>======================= it is in /etc noel _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

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Pine - IV
by Philip S Tellis 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

Making effective use of Pine - IV ================================= Today we'll look at advanced commands in pine. The first option is enable-aggregate-command-set. This allows you to apply a single command to a group of messages. Useful if you want to delete or save all messages that meet some common criteria. The next option, enable-bounce-cmd, is used to bounce messages. If you've ever received mail that you wanted forwarded, but wanted to make it look like it had come from the original sender, then use the bounce command. The access key for bouncing a message is B. You may want to enable the flag commands, which allow you to set certain flags on messages. You could flag a message as important, so that it shows up with an asterisk in your message index. You can also use these to unset the Answered, Deleted or New flags. Enable-full-header allows you to use the H access key to see the full header of received messages. This is useful if you want to see the full path that the mail has travelled to get from its source to its destination. Enable-goto-in-file-browser allows you to tell the file browser exactly which directory you want to go to by typing in its path. This is useful if you need to attach files that are not in the current directory. It's much faster than navigating to the directory every time. Enable-jump-shortcut allows you to jump directly to a message in your message index by typing in its number and pressing Enter. Enable-partial-match-lists and enable-tab-completion affect the behaviour of selection entries. For example, if you wanted to save a message to another folder, just pressing s and Ctrl+X (for the partial match), will show you all folders that start with s. Alternately, if one presses sa<Tab>, and there is only one folder starting with sa, then the folder name is automatically completed. This is similar to the way commands are completed in bash. In Advanced User Preferences, the few that you may want to set include auto-move-read-msgs, enable-mouse-in-xterm, enable-newmail-in-xterm-icon, save-will-advance, and use-current-dir. The first will move read messages to the read-messages folder when closing the folder, if one was set. We'll see more on this when we deal with incoming-folders. Save-will-advance moves to the next message after saving the message. Use-current-dir uses the directory that pine was started in as the default for Takes and Exports. If you find yourself using the same set of commands every time you start pine, for example, pressing I to get to the message index, you may want to put those commands in the initial-keystroke-list. Anything put here will be treated as if you entered it through the keyboard when starting pine. Moving down, we come to character-set. It will normally be set to US-ASCII, but too many people today use iso-8859-1, so it may make sense to set it to this. If you have a favourite text editor (pine's default is pico), then you can set that in editor. vi seems to be a good choice. The speller is the program that is called when you do a Ctrl+T in compose mode. It is supposed to check and correct spellings. The default is the unix spell command that only returns a list of misspelled words. Do not set this value to spell, leave it blank instead. The composer-wrap-column is the column number where the composer will wrap long lines. Setting it to something like 72 or 74 will take care of extra characters added by the reply indent string set when replying to messages. The reply-indent-string is by default set to >. It's probably not a good idea to change this, because many mail clients rely on this string to display original text and current text in different styles. The reply-leading is what shows up at the top of the message when you choose to include the original text in the reply. Pine has a very customisable reply-leadin, but you'll have to explore that on your own. It allows you to include conditions, and variables in your leadin. Display and sending filters can be used to modify mails before sending or after receiving. A typical use of this would be to sign your mails with PGP and then to decode it when received. Alt-addresses are a very useful feature when replying to mails. Let's say you have many email accounts, and you use pine to read all of them. When you reply to a message, and choose to reply to all recipients, pine will also reply to all your other addresses. By putting those addresses in here, pine will detect that they are your addresses, and that they shouldn't be included in the reply list. url-viewers, which is the last option that we will modify, allows you to set the program that is spawned to view urls in the mail. You'd probably want to start something like netscape if you are running X, but lynx or some other text browser if you are not. I have my url-viewers set to this: _TEST("test -L $HOME/.netscape/lock")_ "/usr/bin/netscape -remote 'openURL(_URL_, new-window)' &" _TEST("test -n '${DISPLAY}'")_ "/usr/bin/netscape _URL_ &" "/usr/bin/lynx _URL_" Yes, all three lines. Pine will execute everything in _TEST()_ and if it evaluates to true, will execute the rest of that line. Over here, I first check to see if netscape is already running, if so, then call netscape -remote. If not, then if the DISPLAY variable is set, call netscape. If the DISPLAY variable is not set, then call lynx. You could probably omit the first line, because your netscape startup script already does that check. Notice that netscape is started in the background, while lynx isn't. This is so because lynx runs in the same window as pine (in the shell), while netscape starts its own window. It's not easy to enter this string in the configuration screen, so you may want to type it directly into your .pinerc file. Just search for url-viewers. The next time, we'll look at incoming-folders, and that will conclude this series on pine. There's obviously much more you can do, but you'll have to figure that out yourself. This should get you started on your way. -- "Being against torture ought to be sort of a bipartisan thing." -- Karl Lehenbauer Visit my webpage at http://www.ncst.ernet.in/~philip/ Read my writings at http://www.ncst.ernet.in/~philip/writings/ MSN philiptellis Yahoo! philiptellis

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] suggest lightweight desktop
by Fart Crimson 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

IceWM at www.icewm.org

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ACM Seminar
by Philip S Tellis 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

Just to remind you'll, I'll be giving an ACM Seminar on regular expressions at NCST on Friday the 20th July 2001. All are welcome to attend. Hope this is sufficient advance notice for those who stay far away. Philip -- It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" Visit my webpage at http://www.ncst.ernet.in/~philip/ Read my writings at http://www.ncst.ernet.in/~philip/writings/ MSN philiptellis Yahoo! philiptellis

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] Telnet
by Darshan.wakchaure＠lntinfotech.com 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

Helo Krishnan, inetd folder as well as inetd.conf file is not there. I am using version 7.1 Thanks ======================= Darshan S. Wakchaure ======================= "S. Krishnan" <sri_krishnan(a)yahoo.com To: linuxers(a)mm.ilug-bom.org.in > cc: Sent by: Subject: Re: [ILUG-BOM] (no subject) linuxers-admin(a)mm.ilug- bom.org.in 19-07-2001 01:36 PM Please respond to linuxers --- Darshan.wakchaure(a)lntinfotech.com wrote: > Hi, > Having problem telnetting to Linux machine. > I have installed PCQ7.1 RHL7.1 based Linux on my > server. But unable to get > thru the telnet issue. > Getting "connection refused" error, for which i > checked telnetting from > server and found that the service itself is not up, > how do i start it ?? su to root, edit /etc/inetd.conf, and uncomment the telnet entry (and the entries for any other service that you may want to enable that is listed in inetd.conf). Also, be sure to read the documentation (man pages) for inetd and inetd.conf. Rgds, Krishnan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ Richard Stallman's Public Lecture 5pm 17th July, at TIFR. Linuxers mailing list Linuxers(a)mm.ilug-bom.org.in http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers

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(no subject)
by Darshan.wakchaure＠lntinfotech.com 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

Hi, Having problem telnetting to Linux machine. I have installed PCQ7.1 RHL7.1 based Linux on my server. But unable to get thru the telnet issue. Getting "connection refused" error, for which i checked telnetting from server and found that the service itself is not up, how do i start it ?? Thanks ======================= Darshan S. Wakchaure =======================

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Re: lpr
by Raju Bathija 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

Dear Mr Krishnan, Your wrote: >Check (on the remote machine) >- the permissions on the /var/spool directory and >subdirs Many many thanks for your helpful hint. Yes, indeed the subdir in /var/spool which in the remote system is laser4 had rwx only for user and no rx permission for group and others. By giving the rx permission for all, it solved the problem. Thanks again. Sincerely, -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Raju Bathija | bathija(a)tifr.res.in | http://theory.tifr.res.in/~bathija -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linux, the choice | To teach is to learn. of a GNU generation -o) | Kernel 2.2.14-5. /\ | on a i686 _\_v | |

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some trouble in posting
by Harshal Patil 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

i can't post regularly. ie. sometimes it's OK sometimes ot gives me following error. The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was 'linuxers(a)mm.ilug-bom.org.in'. Subject 'debain cds', Account: 'imap.sify.com', Server: 'smtp.sify.com', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '553 sorry, that domain isn't allowed to be relayed thru this MTA (#5.7.1)', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 553, Error Number: 0x800CCC79 The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was 'linuxers(a)mm.ilug-bom.org.in'. Subject 'debain cds', Account: 'imap.sify.com', Server: 'smtp.sify.com', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '553 sorry, that domain isn't allowed to be relayed thru this MTA (#5.7.1)', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 553, Error Number: 0x800CCC79 -- Registered Linux User #188850 Don't get mad, get Linux! --

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testing
by Harshal Patil 19 Jul '01

19 Jul '01

Sorry, just testing. having some problems in posting. -- Registered Linux User #188850 Don't get mad, get Linux! --

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