MSORT(1)

📦 version 1.1, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💌 MSORT(1) — bestie edition 🎀

okay so this is the manual page for msort, from the General Commands Manual section of your local man collection. she's little, she's mighty, she sorts your mail. let's get into it 💅

✨ NAME ✨

msort — sort messages. that's it. that's the whole job. iconic behavior honestly.

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

msort [-r] [-f | -d | -s | -F | -M | -S | -U | -I] [msgs ...]

look at her. tiny. perfect. the brackets are doing a lot of heavy lifting but she's got range 💖

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so like, msort sorts messages according to various orders, and then prints the resulting message names, separated by newlines. that's the output: just names, one per line, newline-separated. clean. minimal. main character energy.

(if you're wondering how to spell out what a message even is, see mmsg(7) for the message argument syntax. she explains it all, go read her.)

if no messages are specified, msort will read filenames from the standard input — or, if you're using it interactively, she'll use the default sequence instead. no cap.

The options are as follows:

  • -r — reverse order. flip the whole thing around, it's giving backwards 💫
  • -f — sort by From:. who sent it.
  • -d — sort by date.
  • -s — sort by Subject: (modulo various variants of Re:). yes she accounts for all the different Re: flavors, she's thoughtful like that.
  • -F — sort by filename, using proper order for numbers in filenames. so 2 comes before 10, like a civilized sort would do 😌
  • -M — sort by message file modification time.
  • -S — sort by message file size.
  • -U — sort unread messages after read messages. unread goes to the bottom, read rises to the top 🙈
  • -I — sort flagged messages before unflagged messages. flagged stays winning 👑

💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

the msort utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. so like, zero means we ate, anything above zero means something went wrong. periodt.

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

  • mmsg(7) — go read her, she's the whole reason the message syntax makes sense 🫶

👑 AUTHORS 👑

Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org> — the genius behind all of this, we stan 🌟

🌈 LICENSE 🌈

msort is in the public domain. literally free. no strings.

To the extent possible under law, the creator of this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ — that's CC0, go look, it's the most generous license to ever exist 💜

and that's the whole page bestie!! this one shipped with Debian, dated July 22, 2016, and the page itself answers to the name MSORT(1) in the General Commands Manual section 💖 sort those messages, you got this 🎀✨

📦 where this page comes from