On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 12:45:12PM -0500, David Champion wrote: > * On 03 Aug 2010, Nicolas Williams wrote: > > On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 02:00:46PM +0000, Grant Edwards wrote: > > > On 2010-08-02, Nicolas Williams <nicolas.willi...@oracle.com> wrote: > > > > > > > Right. There's no good convention for "end of list of arguments to an > > > > option". There's only a good convention for "end of variable argument > > > > list" ('--'), and since this is the closest thing... > > > > > > And since there _is_ a convention that '--' ends the option list, it's > > > A Bad Thing(TM) to use it for something else. I think violating the > > > almost universal convention about what '--' means is a terrible idea, > > > but apparently we're now stuck with it. > > > > The convention is that '--' ends the entire option list, not a list of > > arguments to a single option. Therefore mutt clearly uses something > > other than the existing convention. > > Strictly speaking, no: since mutt requires the -a option to be last, > a '--' terminating the list of arguments to -a implicitly terminates > the option list as well. I think this may have been part of the design > consideration.
Ah, that is good to know. I just tried: mutt -s 'test mail' will.five...@oracle.com -a /etc/motd /etc/motd /etc/motd < /etc/motd which worked. Unfortunately the mutt usage help: Mutt 1.5.20 (2010-04-22) usage: mutt [<options>] [-z] [-f <file> | -yZ] mutt [<options>] [-x] [-Hi <file>] [-s <subj>] [-bc <addr>] [-a <file> [...] --] <addr> [...] mutt [<options>] [-x] [-s <subj>] [-bc <addr>] [-a <file> [...] --] <addr> [...] < message appears to indicate that the to: address arg(s) must be last. -- Will Fiveash