BURST(1)

💥 BURST(1) 💥

okay bestie, so this is the General Commands Manual page for burst, and it's literally the glow-up your digests have been waiting for 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

burst — explode digests into nmh messages 🎆

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

burst [-help] [-version] [+folder] [msgs] [-inplace | -noinplace] [-mime
     | -nomime] [-automime] [-quiet | -noquiet] [-verbose | -noverbose]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so burst looks at the messages you picked in the folder you named, and it's like "these are Internet digests, actually" and then it explodes them. in that folder. right there. 💥

if you hand it -inplace, each digest gets replaced by its "table of contents" and the digest itself is gone. then burst renumbers all the messages that came after the digest in the folder, so it's making room for every single exploded message — and those get placed immediately after the "table of contents". no cap, that's the layout 📬

if you go -noinplace instead, every digest is preserved, no table of contents gets produced at all, and the exploded messages just get dropped at the end of the folder. other messages in the folder? untouched, minding their own business 🫶

if -automime is given, burst will try to figure out whether the message is formatted with MIME and contains MIME parts of type message/rfc822. if it is, it bursts that message using MIME formatting rules. the -mime switch is there if you wanna enforce MIME formatting (do it, bestie, be decisive ✨). and the -nomime switch will force burst to use RFC 934 rules instead.

the -quiet switch tells burst to be silent about reporting messages that are not in digest format. shhh 🤫

the -verbose switch tells burst to spill — it tells you the general actions it's taking to explode the digest. tea ☕

and here's the fun part: it turns out burst works equally well on forwarded messages and blind-carbon-copies as it does on Internet digests — as long as those were generated by forw or send. iconic behavior honestly 👑

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🎀 FILES 🎀

• $HOME/.mh_profile — the user's profile.

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💖 PROFILE COMPONENTS 💖

• Path: — to determine the user's nmh directory.
• Current-Folder: — to find the default current folder.
• Msg-Protect: — to set mode when creating a new message.

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

inc(1), pack(1)

Proposed Standard for Message Encapsulation (RFC 934)

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⭐ DEFAULTS ⭐

• +folder — the current folder.
• msgs — the current message.
• -noinplace
• -automime
• -noquiet
• -noverbose

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👑 CONTEXT 👑

if a folder is given, it becomes the current folder. ✨

if -inplace is given, then the first message burst becomes the current message. this leaves your context all set up and ready for a show of the table of contents of the digest, and then a next to see the first message of the digest. chef's kiss, so convenient 🎀

if -noinplace is given, then the first message extracted from the first digest burst becomes the current message. this leaves the context in a similar, but not identical, state to the context you'd get with -inplace. close enough, but not twins. twins-adjacent. 🦋

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💀 BUGS 💀

the burst program enforces a limit of approximately 1,000 on the number of messages which may be burst from a single message. there's usually no limit on the number of messages which may reside in the folder after the bursting, though. so the folder can get as big as it wants, but one single message can only give birth to about a thousand little babies 🙈

although burst uses a sophisticated algorithm to determine where one encapsulated message ends and another begins, not all digest creators use an encapsulation algorithm. in degenerate cases, this usually results in burst finding an encapsulation boundary prematurely and splitting a single encapsulated message into two or more messages. these erroneous digest creators should be fixed. fr fr, not cute of them 😭

furthermore, any text which appears after the last encapsulated message is not placed in a separate message by burst. this text is usually an "End of digest" string. as a result of this possibly unfriendly behavior on the part of burst, note that when the -inplace option is used, this trailing information is lost. in practice this is not a problem, since correspondents usually place remarks in text prior to the first encapsulated message, and that information is not lost. so like, your opening remarks survive, your lil sign-off doesn't. the way that works 💀

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heads up bestie: -inplace eats trailing info. just so you know. 💅

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that's the whole page, no gatekeeping, every flag accounted for 🫶 this was nmh-1.8, dated 2013-02-08, and honestly? she ate. periodt. 💖✨🎀🦋🌸