BURST(1mh)

✨ BURST 💥

okay bestie so this is burst, and it lives in the mh manual (that's the 1mh part, iykyk) — and honestly? its whole job is explode digests into nmh messages. literally. that's the name, that's the game. 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

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

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so burst looks at the messages you point it at in the folder you named, decides they're Internet digests, and explodes them right there in that folder. boom. 💥

if you say -inplace, every digest gets swapped out for its “table of contents” and the digest itself dips out (gone, removed, bye 👋). then burst renumbers all the messages that came after that digest in the folder, so there's room for each exploded message — and those land immediately after the “table of contents”.

if you say -noinplace instead, every digest stays put, no table of contents gets made, and the exploded messages just get dropped at the end of the folder. the other messages in there? untouched. not affected. minding their business. 🫶

if you say -automime, 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 the message using MIME formatting rules. the -mime switch is there when you wanna enforce MIME formatting. and -nomime will force burst to use RFC 934 rules instead. periodt.

the -quiet switch tells burst to be silent about reporting messages that aren't in digest format. shhh. 🤫

the -verbose switch tells burst to tell you the general actions it's taking to explode the digest. very main character of it, honestly. 👑

and here's a fun lil fact: it turns out burst works equally well on forwarded messages and blind-carbon-copies as it does on Internet digests — as long as those forwarded/bcc things were generated by forw or send. no cap. ✨

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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 you give it a folder, that folder becomes the current folder. and here's the tea:

if you gave -inplace, 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 a next to peek at the first message of the digest. cute, right?

if you gave -noinplace, 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 one you get when you use -inplace. 🙈

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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 is usually no limit on the number of messages which may reside in the folder after the bursting though. so like, the folder can hold a whole party, it's just the bursting itself that has a cap.

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. 😤

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. and 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. phew. 🫶

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🎀 this was nmh-1.8, dated 2013-02-08 — so yeah, it's giving vintage, but it still slays. go forth and burst responsibly. 💖✨