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Re: Clarification on tag-prefix-cond vs. tag-prefix



On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 09:29:01PM -0600, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Thursday, February 12 at 08:15 PM, quoth John J. Foster:
> >Am I nuts, or are these functionally equivalent?
> 
> You're nuts. :)
> 
> But they *are* very similar. Tag-prefix, of course, means that the 
> next command will apply to all of the tagged messages. But what if 
> there AREN'T any tagged messages? Well then, the next command will 
> apply to whatever message happens to be highlighted! This is usually 
> the right thing to do when working interactively with the user, but 
> when used as part of scripts, lots of times there may not be any 
> tagged messages and in that case, the subsequent action should not 
> occur. THAT is what tag-prefix-cond does: if there aren't any tagged 
> messages, the command buffer is flushed without doing anything (in 
> other words, whatever hook you're in stops dead in its tracks).
> 
> Take for example the folder-hook that I posted earlier today. The idea 
> is that I want mutt to automatically move any messages that are older 
> than 3 months into the archive folder. To refresh your memory, here's 
> what it looks like:
> 
>      folder-hook =Sent 'push "<tag-pattern>~r 
> >3m<enter><tag-prefix-cond><save-message>=Archive.Sent<enter><untag-pattern>~A<enter>"'
> 
> So what happens if there aren't any messages that are older than three 
> months? If I had used <tag-prefix> instead of <tag-prefix-cond>, what 
> would happen is that whatever message happened to be highlighted when 
> I entered that folder would get moved to the archive folder. In my 
> case, I have mutt highlight the first new or unread message when it 
> opens new folders, so if I used <tag-prefix>, that new message would 
> get moved to the archive folder. However, because I use 
> <tag-prefix-cond>, when there aren't any tagged messages (i.e. the 
> pattern "~r >3m" didn't match anything), mutt will stop processing 
> that hook and none of the rest of it will happen.
> 
> Does that make sense?

Yep - and I'm nuts regardless! Thanks for the explanation Kyle.

festus
-- 
I just want to break even.
                Richard Manuel

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