MAIL on AIX V. 3

[Robin Wilson]

In article <6506 at awdprime.UUCP> geo at george.austin.ibm.com (George Noren) writes:
>In article <1991Apr2.215813.12245 at uvm.edu>, moore at emily.uvm.edu (Bryan
>Moore) writes:
>> Previously on AIX 2.2.1 on the RT, when a user was looking at
>> mail, the system would prompt for a key-press when the screen
>> filled up ( like it was piped into pg). On the RS/6000, the
>
>The parameter is:
>
>	set crt=<x>

Or just "set crt" will cause it to use the pager "at all times".  Since, one
clearly doesn't want to have the pager run for messages less than 1 screen 
full, you can specify that your pager is a shell script something like this:

pg -c -e -s -p "PAGE #%d> " $@

(I have never been able to get this to work by specifying that my "PAGER"
environment variable equals this same string.  But by making this little
shell script, and setting PAGER=$HOME/scripts/pager, in my environment I
can get this to work.)

Lets see if I can remember what all these options do:

	-c	Clears screen, and homes the cursor before displaying
		message.

	-e	Does not "pause" at the end of a message.  This means 
		that when I hit the last page of the mail message I
		automatically get dumped out of "pg" and back into the
		mail reader.

	-s	Puts the "pg" prompt in reverse video.

	-p "<string>"  Uses "<string>" as the prompt at the bottom
		of the page.  The "%d" in my "PAGE #%d> " prompt causes
		the current page number to be displayed in place of the 
		"%d" (this would be much more useful if it told me how
		many pages were left too...).

Of course all this available from the "man" pages on the "pg" command.
The nicest part of this pager command is that the "-e" flag keeps the
pager from being used if the message is not a full screen.  Clearing the
screen makes display faster (since it doesn't have to scroll the 
previous screen of data).


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|UUCP:     pensoft!robin                                                      |
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