Last year JHUNIX, the University's oh-so-cleverly-named mail system, switched gears and finally decided to adopt a user-friendly approach with the addition of a new pop-up menu that appears at each log on.
Clearly, this change was a simple reaction to the fact that so few Hopkins students really understand the system's potential to be more than just another way to allow hundreds of users to forward "The Top Ten Most Sexual Lines in Star Wars" to their friends.
JHUNIX actually has the power to do a lot more than just e-mail; its hundreds of arcane commands with names like "tcsh" and "egrep" are a computer science major's wet dream.
While most of the stuff isn't very useful for people with lives, it can save some time and make you feel just a bit more in-touch with the computer age. So have a look at these useful tricks and get more byte for your buck. :)
Signatures
I'm sure you've noticed how some individuals think it's really cool to have some specific line(s) of text-maybe their name and address, or a Simpsons' quote - at the end of every e-mail. That's called a "signature file" or just a "signature." (Some people call it a .dot-signature because, well, they need to be slapped). There are a couple of different ways to make a signature file. But here's the easiest way to append every e-mail you send with "Mmmm, 64 slices of American cheese .."
Start Pine (or select menu item number one from the automatic options menu that pops up at login), type "s" for "setup" at the main menu, and type "s" again for "signature." Now you get a little editing screen kind of like when you send e-mail. Type in your Simpsons quote or what have you, and press "Control-X" when you're done. Voila!
Changing your name
Another cute e-mail trick is to change your identity for humorous, poetic, or even vainglorious effect. Type "s" from the Pine main menu. Now, type "c" for "config."
This gives you a humongous list of things about your e-mail that you can change. You probably don't want to mess with most of them unless you know what you're doing, or you might lose the ability to finger yourself (see below).
One safe item to play with is your name. Get the cursor on the line that says "personal-name" and type "c" for "change value." Go ahead and type "Bart Simpson" or whatever and press return. Now type "e" for "Exit config" and "y" for "yes, I want the world to know me as 'Kevin Sorbo.'"
Note: Don't try to deceive anybody by, say, changing your name to "William H. Brody" and sending your Calculus professor e-mail telling him he's fired. It's pretty easy to figure out who really send the message. For starters, it has your e-mail address on it.
Hidden addresses
A lot of student group officers and the like know this cool trick for sending e-mail to fifty people without making all fifty e-mail addresses hog the screen. Other student groups - the News-Letter editorial board, for instance - wish their officers knew it.
When you compose a message, while the cursor is up at the "header" of the message - where you type who it's going to - press "Control-R." A few new lines show up on the screen. The ones you care about are "Bcc:" and "Lcc:" which stand for "blind carbon copy" and "list carbon copy," if you must know.
Any address you put in "Bcc:" will receive the message you send, but their address won't show up on the screens of the other people getting the message. Cool, huh?
For those of you just dying to know, "Lcc:" is basically the same deal, except the it's tailor-made for lists of addresses (like, say, the members of a club). Any e-mail sent to people on the list will show the list name but not the addresses.
Who sent me mail?
Pine is a really slow program, but there's a quick way to check who sent you mail without starting Pine if you're in a rush to procrastinate. When you log in, select menu item "e" from the pop-up menu, which should bring you to the "$" prompt. From there, type "frm" (short for "from", duh) for a list of e-mails in your inbox, telling you the sender and subject line of each message.
If you have 700 messages in your inbox because you're too much of a lazy bum to delete e-mail after you read it, "frm" will give you a lot of garbage you don't want. No problem! Typing "frm | tail" gives you a list of the last 10 messages to come in. If any of them look super-important, you can type "pine" and read them; otherwise, you can log out and make it to the Beer-B-Q on time for once.
Stalking people
One of the more popular JHUNIX commands, "finger," used to be more of a stalking tool than it is now, but it's still a good detective toy. If you want to know who's behind all those sinister incoming e-mails, just get to the "$" prompt and type "finger kfc12" and things SUCH AS kfc12's name and signature file will pop up.
If you just want to know if someone has been checking his or her mail, type "last kfc12" and the date and time of kfc12's last mail-check will jump on screen.
These tricks just barely crack the hard-candy shell of JHUNIX's awesome power. But, now that you know some, you can go a little further towards appreciating just how amazing a machine JHUNIX is - or at least take a few small steps to understanding why that computer science major was having that wet dream.
Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The News-Letter.