Attachment Viewer You are being asked to supply the name of a command to execute in order to view or otherwise process a particular attachment type. Hopefully, your mail system has been configured with a set of default commands for most of the commonly used attachment types. If one of these is displayed, select Accept to launch the program, but first see the note below on stopping the external program. If there is no default program, and you have no idea how to proceed, select Cancel, which will then prompt you for a filename in which to save the message attachment. If the attachment is of type "message" or "text", you may use the string "MLVIEWER" to display the contents in an ML text window. The following discussion is somewhat technical in nature, because the external program is totally arbitrary, and this program has no way of knowing the exact details required for its operation. The command to be executed is launched using the system shell (normally "/bin/sh") -- which doesn't usually recognize the same syntax as the typical login shell. For instance, the character "~" is usually not interpreted by the system shell to refer to a home directory. There are other minor differences, but this one is the most noticeable; and likely to cause some confusion. If in doubt, please refer to your system documentation, or seek the advice of a knowledgeable administrator. If you supply a simple command name, the contents of the message will be supplied to that command via the standard input channel, which would otherwise be the keyboard. If the command requires a filename to operate, you should place the sequence %s within the command string, which will be replaced with the name of a temporary file which will be created to hold the message attachment. Only one %s is allowed in a command, and there should be no other % characters. Do not run these commands in the background with "&" when using a temporary file, because this program will resume and remove the temporary file before the external command has a chance to access it. If the external program requires terminal interaction, such as keyboard input, you should preceed the command with an appropriate sequence to launch an interactive terminal such as "xterm -e ". Stopping the external program If a default command has been supplied, and you do not know the details of how to stop it, it would be better to select Cancel at this time, and save the attachment to a file instead. You can experiment with it later from an interactive terminal, and not affect your normal mail processing. Your normal mail processing will not resume until the external command has completed normally and/or has been terminated through some means. Note: Since the program to be executed runs completely on its own, in the event the sub-program refuses to quit normally, steps will need to be taken to stop or kill the program from an interactive terminal window or through other means. This program has no way of controlling the sub-program other than to start it running and supply an attachment to it.