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                            The Command Parser
                 how commands in e-mail messages are processed

The parser is the part of Majordomo that extracts commands from e-mail
messages.  In the simplest case it just parses commands, one per line.
It can, however, do much more.

If a message consists of multiple parts, Majordomo will only process
commands in the first body part, and only if it is a text/plain or
text/html body part.  HTML markup is removed from text/html parts before
the commands are processed.

Lines beginning with '#' are considered to be comments, and are ignored.  

Lines ending in a single '\' are joined to the next line.

The second and succeeding body parts can be used to supply data to a
command.  They are referred to by number.  For example, this command

put LISTNAME /welcome Welcome to LISTNAME <@1

would store the contents of attachment number 1 (the first body part
following the one containing commands) into a file called "/welcome".

The parser can also process multi-line commands using here documents
(see "help here_document" for more details).

Breaking long command lines
---------------------------

If a command is too long to fit on a line, or if your mail tool is
'wrapping' lines without your knowledge, you may get error messages back
from the server. The errors will NOT say that the line was too long, but
they will show that parts of the line were interpreted as separate (and
incomplete) commands. To fix this, you can "escape" the line breaks:
anywhere a space is allowed, you can insert a backslash and a hard
return to make the server interpret several lines as just one command.
(White space after the backslash will be ignored.)

For example:

  subscribe-set LISTNAME digest John Jacob Whatsisname <whatsisname@example.com>

is too long for some mail tools. Instead, making sure the '\' is the
very last character on the first line, use this command:

  subscribe-set LISTNAME digest \
  John Jacob Whatsisname <whatsisname@example.com>

The parser will reassemble the two lines into one command.

Signatures
----------

The Majordomo server will automatically stop looking for commands in the
body of an e-mail message when it reaches a recognizable e-mail
signature (one that starts with "-- ").  However, to make sure that your
signature is not processed, you can use the end command.  See "help end"
for more details.

To change what Majordomo expects to find at the beginning of a signature
block, read the "help configset_signature_separator" document.

All of these features also apply to the mj_shell program.

See Also:
   help admin
   help approve
   help command_line
   help default
   help help
   help mj_shell
   help overview

This is the "command_parser" help document for 
Majordomo 2, version 0.1200401130.

For a list of all help documents, send the following command:
   help topics
in the body of a message to mj2@smoe.org.

For assistance, please contact the smoe.org administrators.

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