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What does piping mean? This feature works as follows: MsgEd TE will start an external command or program and feed the mail text into this command’s standard input stream. This feature originally comes from the Unix world. For example, you could pipe the message text into a Perl or Rexx script that analyses the text and does something with it (for example, the script could store the text in a cooking recipe database). The piping feature does not work in all versions of MsgEd TE. It only works in the UNIX version and in those non-UNIX versions that have been compiled with a GNU gcc compiler.
In order to pipe message text into an external program, type Alt-W and select ‘Pipe into external program’. You will then see a dialog box that prompts you for a command to execute. You can enter any commands or programs in exactly the way as you would enter them at the shell prompt of your operating system. MsgEd TE will execute exactly this command and provide the message contents as standard input to the command. For example, you could enter
cat - >test.txt
This of course is a stupid example, because the same result could be achieved by selecting ‘Write to File’ and specifying text.txt as file name, but it shows how the mechanism works.
After that, you will be prompted for the export mode (plain text or binary). See Saving message text into a plain text file, for information on what this means.
Previous: Printing a message, Up: Exporting Mails to Text Files or to the Printer [Index]