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<H2><a name="genusage">General Usage</a></H2>
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<ul>
<li><a href="#resources">What are "resources"?</a></li>
<li><a href="#rfileedit">Is there a resource file editor?</a></li>
<li><a href="#nilresource">How do you set a resource to nil?</a></li>
<li><a href="#newgetopt">I get an error that "newgetopt.pl" cannot be required, where is it?</a></li>
<li><a href="#searching">Does MHonArc provide searching of archives?</a></li>
<li><a href="#webui">Is there a Web interface for MHonArc?</a></li>
<li><a href="#orgmsg">Does MHonArc require that the original message be available when updating an archive?</a></li>
<li><a href="#respecify">Do I have to respecify the resource file each time I update an archive?</a></li>
<li><a href="#sepfiles">Can I have MHonArc process a bunch of separate message files?</a></li>
<li><a href="#stdin">Can I tell MHonArc to read a mailbox from standard input?</a></li>
<li><a href="#parsedate">Why am I getting "Could not parse date for message ..."?</a></li>
<li><a href="#parsedate">Why doesn't MHonArc extract the date from "From ..." line?</a></li>
<li><a href="#count">Why is the number of messages reported by MHonArc less than what is reported by my MUA?</a></li>
</ul>
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<h3><b><a name="resources">What are "resources"?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>The behavior of MHonArc is controled by <em>resources</em>.
Resources are set, or defined, by command-line options, environment
variables, or a resource file. For example, the MAXSIZE resource tells
MHonArc the maximum number of messages in an archive. To set
the resource, you can use the <strong><code>-maxsize</code></strong>
command-line option, the <strong>M2H_MAXSIZE</strong> envariable, or the
<strong><code><MAXSIZE></code></strong> resource file element.
</p>
<p>See the documentation for more information.
</p>
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<h3><b><a name="rfileedit">Is there a resource file editor?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>If you are Vim user,
<a href="http://www.vim.org/"><http://www.vim.org/></a>,
a syntax file
for MHonArc resource files is included in the examples directory
(<b>mhonarc.vim</b>). To use it, copy mhonarc.vim to an appropriate location
and add something like the following to your .vimrc file:
</p>
<pre>
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.mrc so $HOME/share/vim/syntax/mhonarc.vim
</pre>
<p>Of course, change the pathname to mhonarc.vim to where ever you copied
it to.
</p>
<p>Now, any file with ".mrc" extension will put Vim into MHonArc resource
file highlighting mode. The mode is best used with color-capable
terminals.
</p>
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<h3><b><a name="nilresource">How do you set a resource to nil?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>For page layout resources, do something like the following in
your resource file:
</p>
<pre>
<BotLinks>
</BotLinks>
</pre>
<p>Notice the blank line. If you specify no content, MHonArc will
fallback to the default value of the resource.
</p>
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<h3><b><a name="newgetopt">I get an error that "newgetopt.pl" cannot be required, where is it?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>newgetopt.pl comes with the standard Perl distribution. Check with
your sys admin on where it is located (it should be in the default Perl
search path).
</p>
<table border=0 cellpadding=4>
<tr valign=top>
<td><strong>NOTE</strong></td>
<td><p>v2.3 and later use <b>Getopt::Long</b>, which is included
in the Perl 5 distribution.
</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
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<h3><b><a name="searching">Does MHonArc provide searching of archives?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>No, but a searching can be provided by another utility.
The following list of search indexing tools have been used with
MHonArc archives:
</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Glimpse</strong>:
<a href="http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/"
><http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/></a></li>
<li><strong>ht://Dig</strong>:
<a href="http://www.htdig.org/"><http://www.htdig.org/></a></li>
<li><strong>Namazu</strong>:
<a href="http://www.namazu.org/"><http://www.namazu.org/></a>
(MHonArc aware and supports Japanese)</li>
<li><strong>UdmSearch</strong>:
<a href="http://mysearch.udm.net/"><http://mysearch.udm.net/></a></li>
</ul>
<p>For more information, see
the respective documentation of the search engine software of
interest.
</p>
<dl>
<dt><strong>NOTE</strong></dt>
<dd><p>You may also want to check out
<strong><a href="http://www.hpc.uh.edu/majordomo/#wilma">Wilma</a></strong>
at <a href="http://www.hpc.uh.edu/majordomo/#wilma"
><http://www.hpc.uh.edu/majordomo/#wilma></a>.
Wilma is the Web Interface to List Mail Archives, written by Dave Wolfe
and Jason Tibbitts with nods to Achim Bohnet and Tom Christiansen.
WIlma is a relatively simple bit of Perl which links together the
MHonArc mail-to-HTML converter and the Glimpse search engine.
The result is a useful tool for allowing folks to browse your list
archives over the web. It works very well with the archives generated
by Majordomo's archive2.pl script.
</p>
</dd>
</dl>
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<h3><b><a name="webui">Is there a Web interface for MHonArc?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>No official ones. Several users have created home-grown interfaces
to perform various tasks. An experimental web admin tool comes in
with the MHonArc distribution under the "admin" directory.
I recommend searching the
MHonArc mailing list archives for discussion about web interfaces.
</p>
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<h3><b><a name="orgmsg">Does MHonArc require that the original message be available when updating an archive?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>No. Once a message is archived, the original can be stored
away. MHonArc preserves all relevant information in its
database. For possible recovering purposes, it is recommended
to preserve original messages in a storage archive. This allows
you to rebuild MHonArc archives in case of data corruption.
</p>
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<h3><b><a name="respecify">Do I have to respecify the resource file each time I update an archive?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<P>No. The archive database stores all resource settings. The only
time you need to respecify the resource file is if changes are required
in the layout of the archive. </P>
<DL>
<DT><STRONG>NOTE</STRONG>
<DD><P>When utilizing the <strong>OTHERINDEXES</strong> resource,
the resource filenames listed in the main resource file are stored
in the database, but the resources for each additional index are
<STRONG>NOT</STRONG>. Hence, the resource files defining the additional
indexes must be accesible.
</P></DL>
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<h3><b><a name="sepfiles">Can I have MHonArc process a bunch of separate message files?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>Yes. MH mail folder processing is just processing a bunch of
separate message files in a directory. MHonArc uses
the MHPATTERN resource to determine which files to process. Therefore,
all you need to do is redefine the MHPATTERN resource and pass
the directory your message files are in when invoking MHonArc.
</p>
<p>For example, say I want to process all files in a directory
called "messages". I'd do the following:
</p>
<pre>
shell> <b>mhonarc -mhpattern "^[^.]" messages</b>
</pre>
<p>MHPATTERN can be any Perl regular expression. The one in
the example matches any file not beginning with ".". This
is to avoid the special files "." and ".." which are directories.
</p>
<p>The other way to process individual message files is to do
it one at a time. For example:
</p>
<pre>
shell> <b>mhonarc -add < file1.822</b>
shell> <b>mhonarc -add < file2.822</b>
...
</pre>
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<h3><b><a name="stdin">Can I tell MHonArc to read a mailbox from standard input?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>Yes, but only in v2.0 or later (v2.0 beta releases do not have
the capability). The syntax is something like the following:
</p>
<pre>
shell> <b>mhonarc </b><var>[options-here]</var> <b>-- -</b>
</pre>
<p>The "--" tells MHonArc to terminate all command-line
option processing and treat all following arguments as mail
folders. The "-" signifies to use standard input as a mailbox
source.
</p>
<p>Since MHonArc can read a mailbox from stdin, this
allows MHonArc to be part of a pipeline where MHonArc
takes input from some preprocessor that massages some data to
make it suitable for processing by MHonArc. For example:
</p>
<pre>
shell> <b>mypreproc | mhonarc -- -</b>
</pre>
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<h3><b><a name="parsedate">Why am I getting "Could not parse date for message ..."?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>This warning is generated when a message does not contain any date
information, or the date format used in the message is not recognized
by MHonArc. The warning may also indicate an improper end of a message
and start of a new message when processing a mailbox file. You
may also want to see:
<a href="archive.html#split">Why does a
message get split into mulitple messages with no headers?</a>.
</p>
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<h3><b><a name="parsedate">Why doesn't MHonArc extract the date from "From ..." line?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>The "From ..." line (applicable in UUCP-style mailbox files) is
the message separator and normally includes a date. The problem
is that <em>it is the message separator</em>. The message separator
is not part of actual message data, and the value of
the message separator is controled by the MSGSEP resource. I.e.
The MSGSEP resource can be set anything, so there is no reliable
way to extract a date from it.
</p>
<p>Do not lose hope. Provided in the extras directory of the
MHonArc distribution (v2.1.1 and later) is a Perl program called
<b>prsfrom.pl</b> by A.R. Burgers,
<a href="mailto:burgers@ecn.nl">burgers@ecn.nl</a>. The program
will supply missing Date: and From: fields to mailboxes based upon
the message separator line.
</p>
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<h3><b><a name="count">Why is the number of messages reported by MHonArc less than what is reported by my MUA?</a></b></h3>
</td></tr></table>
<p>This usually implies that you have duplicate messages. MHonArc
will not archive a message that has already been archived.
A way to check if message duplication is the culprit, try the following
on your mailbox:
</p>
<pre>
grep -i '^message-id:' my.mbox | sort | uniq | wc -l
</pre>
and
<pre>
grep -i '^message-id:' my.mbox | sort | wc -l
</pre>
<p>If numbers printed by both commands differ, you have duplicate messages.
</p>
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<address>
01/06/10 17:47:21<br>
<img align="top" src="monicon.gif" alt="">
<a href="http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/mhonarc.html"
><strong>MHonArc</strong></a><br>
Copyright © 1997-1999, <a href="http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/"
>Earl Hood</a>, <a href="mailto:mhonarc@mhonarc.org"
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