3.1.2 Options That are Common for All Utilities.

All GNU Mailutils programs understand a common subset of options.

--help

-?

Display a short summary of the command line options understood by this utilities, along with a terse description of each.

The output of this option consists of three major parts. First, a usage synopsis is displayed. For example:

          Usage: sieve [OPTION...] SCRIPT
          GNU sieve -- a mail filtering tool

The first line tells that the sieve utility takes any number of options (brackets indicate optional part) and a single mandatory argument (‘SCRIPT’). The second lines summarizes the purpose of the utility.

Following this header is an option summary. It consists of two columns:

       -c, --compile-only         Compile script and exit
       -d, --debug[=FLAGS]        Debug flags
       -e, --email=ADDRESS        Override user email address

The leftmost column contains a comma-separated list of option names. Short options are listed first. The options are ordered alphabetically. Arguments, if any, are specified after the last option name in the list, so that, e.g. the option ‘-e’ in the example above requires an argument: ‘-e ADDRESS’. Optional arguments are enclosed in square brackets, as in --debug option in the example above.

The rightmost column contains a short description of the option purpose.

The last part of --help output contains some additional notices and lists the email address for reporting bugs.

--usage

Display a short summary of options. In the contrast to the --help option, only option names and arguments are printed, without any textual description. For example:

          Usage: sieve [-cv?V] [--compile-only] [--debug[=FLAGS]]
                       [--email=ADDRESS] SCRIPT

The exact formatting of the output produced by these two options is configurable. See Usage Vars, for a detailed descriptions of it.

--version

-V

Print program version and exit.

--show-config-options

Show configuration options used when compiling the package. You can use this option to verify if support for a particular mailbox format or other functionality is compiled in the binary. The output of this option is intended to be both machine-readable and understandable by humans.

The following command line options affect parsing of configuration files. Here we provide a short summary, the next section will describe them in detail.

--config-file=file

Load this configuration file, instead of the default.

--config-help

Show configuration file summary.

--config-lint

Check configuration file syntax and exit

--config-verbose

Verbosely log parsing of the configuration files.

--no-site-config

Do not load site-wide configuration file.

--no-user-config

Do not load user configuration file.

--set=path

Set configuration variable.