Support@MWat.DeThis script is just a tiny utility used to show in a popup window a list of newly arrived emails, so you can eventually fire up your email program to read them and respond.
Presumed is a MailDir-style mail delivery, that is incoming mail is
put in a directory with (possibly nested) subdirectories, each of which with
cur/new/tmp subdirectories. Or, to put it the other way around: if you
(i.e. your mail program) are using the mailbox-style storage for one
reason or another you may skip this page (and program) and have a look at e.g.
man xbiff.
Anyway, here we're only interested in the $MAILDIR/.../new/
directory where all incoming mail ends up (that is, until the users MUA moves it to
the $MAILDIR/.../cur/ directory). This script doesn't care, how a
email made its way into one of those ../new/ directories, e.g. by the
PostFix MTA writing it directly, or by a MDA like procmail
writing it after applying its receipts, or by other means. The only thing, actually,
that counts in this context is the fact that there is a new file.
By comparing the filedate of the files inside the $MAILDIR hierachy
(see the --maildir option below) with an internally maintained 0-byte
flag file (~/.xnm.time) it's determined whether a file is considered
new. Besides that before a files shows up in the notification window some more
conditions must be met: it must be stored in a subdirectory named new as
mentioned above and it must not be empty, i.e. contain the
Date/From/Subject/To header fields which are to be shown by the
notification window after a line stating the relative directory (i.e. w/o the
$MAILDIR path) where the given mail was found (assuming you and your MUA
are using meaningful directory names).
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There are some optional commandline switches in both short and long variants which
may be used. The long option names may be shortened to at least three letters; the
phrase prints out means, the output is written to stdout
(i.e. usually your display/screen) so that you can redirect it to a file or pipe
through some other tool (e.g. lpr). – In alphabetical order:
new directory, see above). In case there are no such mails, a
short message indicating this fact is written to stdout.120 secs) Number of seconds to sleep between each mail
lookup. To follow the be-friendly-rule, after each directory scan the script goes
sleeping for a while before starting a new scan. This option can be used to
lengthen that time. – While it's possible as well to shorten the 2
minutes default to at least 1 second, there's no sense in doing so: apart from
wasting system ressources for such a busy loop, most probably it would better to
simply keep your MUA (email program) open if want some kind of, hmm, realtime
access without running this script at all.~/Mail) The name of the directory tree to scan for new
mails.3600 secs) The number of seconds to show the
notification window. The default value of one hour may seem very long. I've
chosen it, because the window can be closed at any time anyway if you wish so.
Additionally, I say, what's the purpose of a notification that just pops up and
vanishes again after a short period while I happend to sit, er, recycling some
biological stuff? Or distracted by a lenghty phone call demanding attention and
support? Or breeding some cool ideas? Or ...new EMail") The window title of the
notification window; the current date/time is automatically prepended.[up to Table of Contents]
The following utilities are used by this script and are assumed to be reachable in PATH (which is checked on startup, bailing out if one of this tools couldn't be found by the shell):
Xdialog/bin/bashdate~/.xnm.time file, see the Files section below) to set
(together with touch) the internal last checked flag, and it prepends
the window title with the current time (as of showing that notification
window).killallsedsorttouch~/.xnm.time file, see the Files section below) and with
the --all switch (see above) to set (together with date)
the internal last checked flag.[up to Table of Contents]
There are no special requirements to run this script besides the availability of the system tools listed above. One (optional) environment variable may affect this script:
~/.bash_profile shell
configuration file) it's used as the default value for the mail directory to
scan. Whether it's set or not, however, the --maildir commandline
option (see above) will always override this setting. In other words: If you
don't want to use the --maildir commandline option although your
mail directory happens to be, say, ~/MailDir just add the line
export MAILDIR=~/MailDir to your ~/.bash_profile and
you're done (from the next time you log in, that is).[up to Table of Contents]
Apart from the system tools listed above the following files are used:
Xnm~/bin would be fine or – if you happen to run the
KDE desktop manager on top of X – the
~/.kde/Autostart directory might be handy.~/.xnm.rcXnm. – The script automatically creates a simple sample (sounds
cool, doesn't it?) resulting in a lightyellow window background. If you prefer
the Xdialog default (grayish) style, just delete this file (or trim it
to 0 byte). – Any changes to this file come into effect the next
time a notification window is created; there's no need to restart a running
script instance.~/.xnm.time~/.xnm.xpmXPM file that you find more fitting to this location. – In case
you want to revert to the default one I created, just delete this file and the
script will be happy to recreate the icon for you just before popping up another
notification window.[up to Table of Contents]
$Log: Xnm,v $
Revision 1.5 2004/07/27 10:22:20 matthias
* changed former --daily switch to --all, updated docs accordingly;
Revision 1.4 2004/07/25 08:26:08 matthias
+ added -d|--daily option (replacing former --once switch);
* modified sed script (for html output) to catch underlines at end'o'line;
Revision 1.3 2004/07/21 10:19:18 matthias
+ added commandline handling (incl. some new options) to allow for
changing the default values w/o editing the script;
+ added (lots of) documentation (available by --html and --info)
and a brief usage text (-h or --help), the latter used by
all startup error messages as well;
* modified (simplyfied) file filtering in showWindow();
* moved conditional icon creation from main() to showWindow() to allow
for changing the icon at runtime w/o restart;
Revision 1.2 2004/07/19 14:04:21 matthias
+ created an icon (~/.xnm.xpm) to be shown with the text;
+ added usage of a GTK+ configuration RC file (~/.xnm.rc);
* instead of simply listing the filenames of new mail now the
Date/From/Subject/To header fields of each mail are shown;
* files ending with index/idx/sorted are excluded from processing;
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