COUNTMAIL(6)

💌 COUNTMAIL(6) 💌

okay bestie, welcome to the Games Manual corner of the internet, where we have exactly one job and that job is being loud about your inbox 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

countmail — be obnoxious about how much mail you have

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

countmail

like. that's it. no flags. no args. she just goes. 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so countmail counts your mail 📬 and then tells you about it, and honestly? rather obnoxiously. that's the whole bit. that's the assignment. she is not subtle, she is not chill, she is main character energy about your unread messages and she wants you to know. 😭

👑 HISTORY 👑

the lore!! 🫶 countmail first appeared in NetBSD 1.3. she was first written by Noah Friedman <friedman@splode.com> way back in 1993 — a true OG, an icon, a legend, and she is the moment. ✨

this version was written by Charles M. Hannum ⟨mycroft@NetBSD.org⟩. queen shit. 👑

💀 CAVEATS 💀

okay so, real talk, no cap — the read loop is horrendously slow on every shell implementation that has been tried. like, genuinely tragic. not me waiting for a shell loop to finish 💀

so instead, countmail uses from(1) and wc(1). but heads up: those are not shell builtins. ngl, that's the tradeoff. 🙈

bestie this is not a performance brag, this is a performance warning. the loop is slow. that's canon.

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• from(1)

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Debian • October 3, 1997 — and that's the whole page, bestie!! mwah 💖 thanks for reading, go check your mail, ily 🫶✨