On Your Desk Q & A

Q: When I start electronic mail on Carson, the Pine window says it is "READ-ONLY." When this happens, I can't delete any email messages. What's wrong?

A: Only one "writable" Pine session can be running in your Uniform Access account. If you start Pine while a previous Pine session is still running, the latest session will be "read-only," and will not allow you to delete any messages. This can happen even when you did not leave Pine running deliberately. In such a case, your earlier Pine session did not quit and that session is not visible on your terminal.

A new version of Pine is due soon that will allow you to quickly correct this problem from within Pine. Meanwhile, see the Pine online help text for information about fixing the read-only problem. To view the help text, from the Main Menu screen, press ? Once you are at the Help for Main Menu screen, go to item number four, which is entitled "Stuck in Read-only mode," and follow the instructions for killing a process.

When you are sure there are no Pine processes running, you should be able start a normal Pine session.

Q: Is it possible to export the contents of an entire Pine folder to a file in my Uniform Access account? I would like to move old folders to the computer here in my office and store them on a floppy disk. It would be more efficient to export the entire folder rather than exporting each message individually.

A: No, there is not a way in Pine to export entire folders. But you do not need to use Pine at all, because Pine folders are actually files. These files are in the mail directory in your Uniform Access account. Instead of using Pine to export each message in a folder to a file, you can use FTP to transfer an entire folder to your desktop computer.

For example, let's assume you want to copy a folder named old-mail from your Uniform Access account to your desktop computer. From your desktop computer, use FTP to connect to your account on the Uniform Access computer. Once you are logged in to your account, use the following commands from the FTP prompt (ftp>):

  ftp> cd mail
  ftp> get old-mail
  ftp> quit

The old-mail file is copied to your desktop computer, and you can copy it to a floppy disk. Once you have the file on floppy disk, you may want to delete the original folder from the Uniform Access computer to free-up disk space in your account. You can do this in Unix, or in Pine. Before doing this in Unix, however, make sure that Pine is not running in any window on your computer.

Q: I have tried to run NCSA Telnet with MS-Windows and my computer either freezes or I get kicked out of Windows. Doesn't NCSA Telnet support Windows?

A: Yes, NCSA Telnet does support Windows. However, you must make a few modifications to your AUTOECEC.BAT file. For instructions on how to do this, send email to help@cac.washington.edu

University of Washington Computing & Communications
Windows on Computing, No. 13, May 1993
newsltr@cac.washington.edu