Howdy. On my previous machine (running HP-UX 10.20), I had nmh (1.0, I
believe) set up so that Netscape (3.04, I believe) would pop up a new window
to show me text/html parts of messages.
I'm now trying to get this working on my current AIX 4.1.5.0.01 machine
running nmh 1.0.1 and Netscape 3.04, and I'm failing. I believe the
mhn.defaults line I was using on that machine was the same as the one I'm
trying to use now:
mhshow-show-text/html: %pnetscape -noraise -remote "openFile('%F', new-window)"
What happens is that I get a new blank window and a Netscape: Error popup
saying something like:
Netscape is unable to find the file or directory named:
'/u1/dan/mail/mhshowANn.Ma'
Check the name and try again.
Indeed, if I check in my mail directory, the temp file is gone, and I
understand why this is. Apparently mhshow deletes the temporary file as
soon as the program it runs has executed. Unfortunately, though, netscape
-remote just sends a message to the existing netscape process telling it to
open that file and then exits. By the time the existing netscape gets
around to trying to open the file, it's gone.
I'm wondering how the heck this was working on my old machine. My old
machine was quite a bit faster, so maybe it had time to read the file before
it got deleted?? Seems unlikely -- it had a faster disk, too, so the
deletion should have happened first.
Did older versions of nmh (I might have been using a version prior to 1.0
the last time I did this) have show delete the temp file when _it_ exited
rather than mhshow/mhn doing it?? This is the only way I can think of that
this could have been working.
Short of changing mhshow and show so that they work this way, I can think of
only two reasonable solutions to the problem:
1. Change mhn.defaults so that mhshow sends its output to cat, which would
redirect to another temporary file with a fixed name. The problems with
this approach are that only one invocation of show on a text/html file
could be run at a time, and the second temporary file would never get
deleted.
2. Change mhn.defaults so that mhshow sends its output to cat, which would
redirect to a uniquely-named (or as uniquely-named as mhshow is capable
of -- I guess there's no %escape that translates to the process ID)
temporary file. Fire off netscape -remote on that file and then fire off
a background process that would sleep for a goodly amount of time and
then delete the temporary file. Once the file has been deleted, you
can't use Netscape's Refresh command, of course.
These seem to be the only solution. It'd be great if you could do netscape
-remote "openFile(-)" to get it to read from stdin, but that doesn't work.
Perhaps we should change (or change back???) mhshow and show so that with
the %f/%F escape, mhshow is responsible for creating the temp file but show
is responsible for deleting it.
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