DEFINEVAR

Syntax

Envariable: N/A
Element: <DEFINEVAR> variable-name
value ...
</DEFINEVAR>
Command-line Option: -definevar variable-specification-list

Description

DEFINEVAR is used for creating user-defined resource variables. DEFINEVAR can be defined on the command-line or in the resource file.

On the command-line, the option is called -definevar The following argument after -definevar is treated as a variable specification list. The specification list is a string containing name/value pairs with the following format:

NAME=VALUE

Multiple name/value pairs are separated by whitespace. If VALUE contains whitespace, then it must be surrounded by quotes to prevent the command shell from treating the string as multiple arguments. Multiple -definevar options can be specified on the command-line. This can help reduce the ugliness of specify mutliple variable definitions with a single option.

NOTE

If you intend to include resource variables as part of the VALUE, you may need to escape the '$' characters (and possible other characters) to prevent interpolation by the command shell. See your command shell documentation for more information.

In a resource file the <DEFINEVAR> element may occur mutliple times to define multiple variables. The first line of the <DEFINEVAR> element is the name of the variables. All subsequent lines represent the content of the variable. If you do not want the last newline of a <DEFINEVAR> element content to be part of the defined variable content, then specify the chop attribute.

Default Setting

N/A

Resource Variables

N/A

Examples

The following is a simple example of defining a variable to represent the base text for the title of an archive:

<DefineVar chop>
MAIN-TITLE
Comp.lang.perl.misc 
</DefineVar>

Now, the variable can be refernced as follows:

<TTitle chop>
$MAIN-TITLE$ (thread)
</TTitle>

If you wanted to use the same resource file for multiple arcvhives it may better to define $MAIN-TITLE$ on the command-line as follows:

    % mhonarc -definevar MAIN-TITLE='mhonarc mailing list' ...

Version

2.0