On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 04:49:38PM +0100, Linux-Fan wrote: > > My favorite hex editor is `dhex` (Debian package `dhex`). > > > From to the list of requirements, it does 4 of 6. > > Excuse me, this is mis-quoted, it should of course have been this > (i.e. both lines attributed to me): > > > My favorite hex editor is `dhex` (Debian package `dhex`). > > From to the list of requirements, it does 4 of 6.
A line that begins with the word "From" followed by a space often triggers unwanted changes, as software attempts to work around the legacy mbox formats. In the mbox family of mailbox storage formats, all of the messages in a mailbox are concatenated together into a single file, and the way a new message is identified is by the string "From " at the start of a line. Therefore, if a line of the message body begins with "From ", something has to be done to "escape" it. Usually, what happens is something sticks a ">" character in front of it, and you get ">From ". In your case, there's an extra space, which I haven't personally seen before, but... meh, it's close enough. Maybe your particular set of mail software decided to use "> " as the work around, or maybe your mail software added ">" and then some sort of post-processing prettifying step added the space to what it perceived as a quotation. The world may never know. It's not worth stressing about. Just acknowledge/accept that lines beginning with From get mangled sometimes.