Removing Messages

Removing messages from an archive is done via the -rmm option. Messages to be deleted are designated by message numbers on the command-line.

Example

% mhonarc -rmm 24 28 39 48
Removing messages from ./maillist.html ...
        Removing message 24
        Removing message 28
        Removing message 39
        Removing message 48

Writing HTML ...
45 messages


Message Numbers

Normally, you will never have to worry about message numbers unless you want to remove messages from an archive. Therefore, you will need to know how MHonArc assigns message numbers when processing messages.

When a message is processed, the smallest available number is assigned to it, starting with 0. The number assigned to a message becomes part of the filename for the HTML version of the message (eg. msg00042.html).

To avoid message number conflicts, MHonArc determines the smallest available number by finding the largest assigned number and adding one to it.


Scanning an Archive

You will quickly find out that finding the message numbers for a messages you want to remove can be a cumbersome task if all you have to work with are the message filenames. To ease this task, MHonArc gives you the ability to scan an archives contents via the -scan command-line option.

Example

% mhonarc -scan
100 messages in .:

Msg #  YY/MM/DD  From             Subject                                      
-----  --------  ---------------  ---------------------------------------------
  513  95/02/09  Rick Silterra    EDComment(sic)                               
  517  95/02/09  Earl Hood        Re: DTD2HTML                                 
  512  95/02/09  Earl Hood        Re: edc2html                                 
  516  95/02/09  John Barnum      Re: DTD2HTML                                 
  515  95/02/09  Earl Hood        Re: DTD2HTML                                 
  511  95/02/09  Rick Silterra    edc2html                                     
  514  95/02/08  John Barnum      DTD2HTML                                     
  510  95/02/06  jflores          mhonarc_diagnostics.doc.html                 
  509  95/02/06  web              Dr.Web: Status Review + Thank You            
  508  95/02/05  Earl Hood        Re: sgml to html converters                  
  507  95/02/03  Aileen Barry     sgml to html converters                      
  506  95/01/28  Earl Hood        Re: MHonarc: Deleting Messages from an archiv
  505  95/01/28  Floyd Moore      MHonarc: Deleting Messages from an archive   
  504  95/01/25  Earl Hood        Re: MHonArc                                  
  503  95/01/25  Earl Hood        Re: MHonArc                                  
...

The messages are listed in the same order as they are listed in the archive's index page. You will notice that the list order does not necessarily correspond with message number order. If you always want the messages listed in message number order when scanning, use the following:

% mhonarc -scan -nosort -noreverse 
82 messages in .:

Msg #  YY/MM/DD  From             Subject                                      
-----  --------  ---------------  ---------------------------------------------
    0  94/05/09  Michael O´Sulli  Re: Finger within an html                    
    1  94/04/31  John M. Troyer   Re: TROFF to HTML Converters                 
    2  94/05/04  John D. Kilburg  ANNOUNCE: Chimera 1.53                       
    3  94/05/17  Stephen Billing  Re: government www?                          
    4  94/05/21  C. Emory Tate    Re: government www?                          
    5  94/05/24  Daniel W. Conno  Re: Comments on HTML 2.0 document/DTD        
    6  94/05/24  Dan Connolly     Re: Validating HTML documents:               
    7  94/05/25  Henrik Frystyk   CERN Common World-Wide Web Library 2.16pre2 A
    8  94/06/04  Denesh Bhabuta   Re: Atari on www (revisited)                 
    9  94/06/07  Dale Newfield    ANNOUNCE: Come explore The Edge - SIGGRAPH 94
   10  94/06/11  Roy T. Fielding  Announcing libwww-perl 0.12                  
...


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MHonArc 1.1.0 -- Removing Messages