Primer for using the ELM mailer
The elm program is a comprehensive program for sending and receiving
electronic mail on Unix systems. It is a very powerful program with many
features, only a few of which are described here. Type man elm
from Unix to find more about the system if you are interested. You may
also type a ? (question mark) inside of elm to access
the online help information. ?? provides a summary of all the
keystroke commands.
Most of the useful commands are listed at the bottom of your screen.
The most useful ones are:
| m |
to send mail |
| r |
to reply to mail |
| s |
to save mail (which also marks it for deletion) |
| d |
to delete mail (you will be asked whether you want to delete it when
you quit) |
| q |
to quit |
I will use electronic mail and the web site to disseminate much of the
course information, so you should check your mail and the web site fairly
often. You will also be using electronic mail to submit your programs to
me.
Receiving and saving mail
To view your mail, type elm at the frodo prompt.
If you have any mail, it will be listed on your screen by author and subject.
To view a particular message, use the arrow keys to move to it, and press
Enter to read it.
You can save the current message by pressing s. You will
be prompted for a file to save it into (if it is a program, you will probably
want to save it as a .cc file). Note that the addressing information
at the top of the message is also saved into the file. Therefore, if the
message is a program, you will want to use the Pico editor to delete those
lines before compiling.
Sending mail
To send mail, do the following in elm:
-
Press the m key to indicate that you want to send mail.
-
Enter the address (mine is whit@granite.sru.edu) when prompted
who to send the message to.
-
Enter an appropriate subject (such as Programming assignment 1)
when prompted.
-
Eventually, you should get a screen that looks a lot like the Pico editor.
You can then use Pico to write your message just like you would use it
to type a program.
-
Press ^X to exit, as you would in Pico. You will be asked if you
want to save the message (press y), what file you want to save the
message to (do not change the unusual-looking file that it gives
-- just press Enter at that point), and then whether you want to
send it (press s).
Mailing a program
Use m to get into the mailer (entering the address and subject
as above). Once you get into Pico, you can read in your program file:
-
Type ^R (that is, control-r) to indicate that you want to read from
a file.
-
When prompted, enter the filename of your program. The file should then
appear on the screen.
At this point you can use ^X to send me the mail, which will now
contain your program.