MSHOW(1)

💌 MSHOW(1) 💌

okay so bestie, gather round, because mshow is literally that girl 💅 — she renders your messages and extracts MIME parts, and she does it beautifully. this is a General Commands Manual situation, so let's get into it ✨

---

🌸 NAME 🌸

mshow — render messages and extract MIME parts

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

mshow [-h headers] [-A mimetypes] [-nqrBFHLN] [msgs ...]
mshow -x msg parts ...
mshow -O msg parts ...
mshow -t msgs ...
mshow -R msg

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so mshow renders the specified msgs to standard output, by default, periodt. (and if you're wondering about the whole message argument situation, see mmsg(7) for all the deets — it's giving essential reading 🫶)

and like, if you're using it interactively and you didn't specify any msgs, mshow just goes ahead and displays the current message with colorization and a pager. main character energy, honestly 👑

the options are as follows, and yes, we're going through all of them:

✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -h headers — Display the headers in the colon-separated list headers, instead of the default headers from:subject:to:cc:date:reply-to:. iconic defaults, ngl 💅
• -A mimetypes — Define multipart/alternative preference. mimetypes is a colon-separated list of MIME types which will be preferred, in the order given, when rendering multipart/alternative parts. If no MIME type matches, the last MIME part will be rendered.

and like, when mimetypes is all, mshow will render all parts of a multipart/alternative part. slay.

Defaults to text/plain:text/html. 🎀

• -n — Don't update the current message link.
• -q — Don't render the body, stop after header output. sometimes you just want the vibes, not the content, yk?
• -r — Don't render the body, print raw body. > ⚠️ This may be dangerous to use on a tty. like, fr fr, be careful bestie 😭
• -B — Decode encoded-words also in MIME parameters in direct violation of RFC 2047. This is useful if the attachment names look like =?UTF-8?Q?stuff?=. yes, we're being rebellious, and honestly? valid 🙈
• -F — Don't apply filters to MIME parts.
• -H — Don't decode the headers, print all raw headers. > ⚠️ This may be dangerous to use on a tty. again, watch out 😭
• -L — Don't filter the headers, print all decoded headers.
• -N — Don't show MIME structure markers.
• -x msg — Switch to extraction mode: extract parts from the message msg into files. parts can be specified by number, filename or fnmatch(3) pattern. If no parts are specified, extracts all attachments with a filename. very demure, very mindful extraction 💖
• -O msg — Like -x but write to standard output. > ⚠️ This may be dangerous to use on a tty. and when used together with -r, the whole part is raw, that is, un-decoded and including MIME part headers. so raw, so real 🔥
• -t — Switch to list mode: list all MIME parts of each msg. the way this just lists everything? obsessed.
• -R msg — Render the text parts from msg, suitable for use in a reply. perfect for when you need to quote someone but make it cute 🎀

🧚 FILTERS 🧚

mshow, by default, decodes all text/*, message/rfc822 and multipart/* parts, and re-encodes them into UTF-8 if necessary. lowkey doing the most so you don't have to 🫶

other filters can be specified in the file ${MBLAZE:-$HOME/.mblaze}/filter (or via MAILFILTER), in the format:

type/subtype: command

or

type: command

mshow will then spawn a pipe to command, write the MIME part to standard input and display the output. the environment variable PIPE_CHARSET will be set to the charset declared in the MIME part, if known. bestie communication, honestly ✨

filters can communicate with mshow using their exit status, and this is where it gets technical:

1. 0 — The output is printed as plain text.
2. 62 — The output is printed raw, without escaping.
3. 63 — Behave as if the filter never ran.
4. 64 — The output is an RFC 5322 message that should be rendered again.
5. 65 to 80 — Render the n-64th part of this text/multipart part.

all other exit statuses are regarded as errors. so like, stick to the script, okay? 💀

🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

• MAILFILTER — Path to an alternative filter file.
• MBLAZE_NOCOLOR — If non-empty, mshow will not spawn a colorization filter. (but like, why would you want that? the color is the whole point 🎀)
• MBLAZE_PAGER — Any non-empty value of the environment variable MBLAZE_PAGER is used instead of the standard pagination program, specified in PAGER. When empty or set to cat, no pager is spawned. iykyk 💅

⭐ EXIT STATUS ⭐

The mshow utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. simple, clean, iconic.

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

mmsg(7)

💜 AUTHORS 💜

Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org> — an absolute legend 🫶

🍓 LICENSE 🍓

mshow is in the public domain.

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/

---

and that's the whole thing, bestie! this page is from the Debian source, dated January 17, 2021, and it's giving classic manpage realness 💖 go forth and render those messages, you've got this 🌸✨