RCVPACK(1)

📦
version 1.8 · 7 versions
, in alpine 3.24, epel 10, epel 9, fedora 43, fedora 44

💌 RCVPACK(1) — the General Commands Manual's own little mail-stuffer 💌

okay so bestie, welcome to rcvpack, straight out of the General Commands Manual section 1 lineup 🌸 she's a tiny lil utility whose whole personality is: take an email off standard input, yeet a copy of it onto the end of a file. that's it. that's the gig. and honestly? she ate. 💅

✨ NAME ✨

rcvpack — appends an email from standard input to a file 📥➡️📄

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

/usr/libexec/nmh/rcvpack [-help] [-version] file [-mbox] [-mmdf]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so like, rcvpack appends a copy of a message to the file you name on its command line. you feed her the message on standard input, she drops it at the bottom of the file, done, no notes. ✨

now, the delimiter situation — because messages in a file need to know where one ends and the next begins, and she has two whole aesthetics for that:

  • if you hand her the -mbox switch (and btw, this is the default, she's already dressed like this), messages get separated by mbox (uucp) style delimiters. this is the format most mail clients rock — elm, mailx, etc. 👑
  • alternatively, if you give her -mmdf instead, messages get separated by mmdf style delimiters, where each message is separated by four CTRL-A's and a newline. yes. four. count 'em. 😭

and here's the part that's lowkey iconic: rcvpack will correctly lock and unlock the file to serialize access when you're running multiple copies of rcvpack at the same time. no two instances stepping on each other's toes. she's a considerate queen 🫶

heads up though: in general, rcvpack has been rendered obsolete by the file action of slocal. sad but true 💀 although… she may still have some use in shell scripts. so if that's your vibe, she's still here for you. 🧚

🎀 FILES 🎀

  • /etc/nmh/mts.conf — the nmh mts configuration file ⭐

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

go say hi to her sisters, they're all cute 💜

💀 BUGS 💀

okay so not everything is slay. only two return codes are actually meaningful, and honestly? the others should be. they're just out here vibing with no purpose 🙈 fr fr.

nmh-1.8 · 1999-04-30 — yeah she's a vintage baddie and she's been serving since the nineties, periodt. 💖✨🎀

📦 where this page comes from