3.4 frm and from — List Headers from a Mailbox

Editor's note: The information in this node may be obsolete or otherwise inaccurate. This message will disappear, once this node revised.

GNU mailutils provides two commands for listing messages in a mailbox. These are from and frm.

The behavior of both programs is affected by the following configuration file statements:

Statement	Reference
debug	See Debug Statement.
tls	See TLS Statement.
mailbox	See Mailbox Statement.
locking	See Locking Statement.

frm

The frm utility outputs a header information of the selected messages in a mailbox. By default, frm reads user's system mailbox and outputs the contents of From and Subject headers for each message. If a folder is specified in the command line, the program reads that folder rather than the default mailbox.

The following command line options alter the behavior of the program:

-d

--debug

Enable debugging output.

-f string

--field string

Display the header named by string instead of From Subject pair.

-l

--to

Include the contents of To header to the output. The output field order is then: To From Subject.

-n

--number

Prefix each line with corresponding message number.

-Q

--Quiet

Be very quiet. Nothing is output except error messages. This is useful in shell scripts where only the return status of the program is important.

-q

--query

Print a message only if there are unread messages in the mailbox.

-S

--summary

Print a summary line.

-s attr

--status attr

Only display headers from messages with the given status. Attr may be one of the following: ‘new’, ‘read’, ‘unread’. It is sufficient to specify only first letter of an attr. Multiple -s options are allowed.

-t

--align

Tidy mode. In this mode frm tries to preserve the alignment of the output fields. It also enables the use of BIDI algorithm for displaying subject lines that contain text in right-to-left orientation (such as Arabic or Hebrew).

from

The from utility displays sender and subject of each message in a mailbox. By default, it reads the user's system mailbox. If the program is given a single argument, it is interpreted as a name of the user whose mailbox is to be read. Obviously, permissions are required to access that user's mailbox, so such invocations may be used only by superuser.

The option -f (--file) instructs from to read the given mailbox.

The full list of options, supported by from follows:

-c

--count

Prints only a count of messages in the mailbox and exit.

-d

--debug

Prints additional debugging output.

-s string

--sender=string

Prints only mail whose ‘From:’ headers contain the supplied string.

Editor's note: Probably, this should test envelopes as well.

-f url

--file=url

Examine mailbox from the given url.