This is an archive of past FreeBSD releases; it's part of the FreeBSD Documentation Archive.

scanshows you a scan of your messages
An MH Primer
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2.3. scan—shows you a scan of your messages

scan will display a brief listing of the messages in your current folder. This is an example of what the scan command will give you. 

      30+ 01/16 "Jordan K. Hubbar  Re: FBSD 2.1<<> Do you want a library instead of
      31  01/16 Bruce Evans        Re: location of bad144 table<<>> >It would appea
      32  01/16 "Jordan K. Hubbar  Re: video is up<<> Anyway, mrouted won't run, ev
      33  01/16 Michael Smith      Re: FBSD 2.1<<Nate Williams stands accused of sa
Like just about everything in MH this display is very configurable. This is the typical default display. It gives you the message number, the date on the email, the sender, the subject line, and a sentence fragment from the very beginning of the email if it can fit it. The + means that message is the current message, so if you do a show it will display that message.

One useful option for scan is the -reverse option. This will list your messages with the highest message number first and lowest message number last. Another useful option with scan is to have it read from a file. If you want to scan your incoming mailbox on FreeBSD without having to inc it you can do scan -file /var/mail/username. This can be used with any file that is in the mbox format.

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show, next and prev—displaying and moving through email Up rmm and rmf—remove the current message or folder