Using e-mail

Reading an attachment

If a user of SCO Shell Mail sends you a message, and attaches a file or clipboard item to it, the attachment is included in the message when you read it. This is because mail, unlike SCO Shell, does not treat an attachment as being a separate item. The attachment itself is in an encoded form that you can read by piping it through the filter uudecode, or by saving the message in a file and decoding the file separately using uudecode. See ``Sending large files via mail'' for further details.

To pipe a message through a filter:

Set the variable cmd to contain the name of the filter program to use.
Issue the | (pipe) command.

In this instance, we want to send the message through uudecode. To do this, type:

set cmd="uudecode"

When you type the mail command ``|'', the contents of the current message will be decoded.

You do not see the decoded contents of the attachment. This is because uudecode automatically saves its output in a file with the name and permissions that appear at the top of the attachment. For more details about the format of encoded files, see ``Sending large files via mail''.

You can read the decoded file using the command !more filename from the mail prompt (where filename is the name on the first line of the encoded attachment).