Downloading Attachments from PINE

Getting attachments is one of the bigger problems with using PINE to check e-mail. You can read your text e-mails just fine, but when somebody sends you an attachment, it's stuck on the remote server. You need a way to get it to your home computer. There are at least three ways to take care of the problem. This is one way to do it.

The idea here is to save the attachment to your UNIX home directory, and move it from there to where you can download it on the web. For this your UNIX account needs to offer web page hosting with it. If you have an Artifex account, you're set.

The first task is to get your attachment out of PINE and into your home directory on the UNIX server. To do this, choose to view and then save your attachment to a file in your home directory. The save prompt will look something like this:

  PINE 4.21   ATTACHMENT INDEX             Folder: INBOX  Message 39 of 39

   1      1 lines   Text/PLAIN
   2    9.2 MB      Image/JPEG, ""                                        

















SAVE: Copy attachment to file in home directory: salad.jpg                
^G Help       ^T To Files
^C Cancel    Ret Accept

Now quit pine. You're back at the shell prompt. Type "mv " followed by the name of the attachment, followed by " ./public_html/" and return. It should look like this:

[hblanks@solar hblanks]$ mv salad.jpg ./public_html/
[hblanks@solar hblanks]$

If you get an error complaining that the directory doesn't exist, you need to make create your public_html directory. Type "mkdir public_html" and return, and then retype the mv command. Something like this:

[hblanks@solar hblanks]$ mkdir public_html
[hblanks@solar hblanks]$ mv salad.jpg ./public_html/
[hblanks@solar hblanks]$

Open a web browser on your home computer. The location/URL you want is "artifex.org/~" followed by your username, followed by a "/", followed by the name of your attachment. Something like "artifex.org/~hblanks/salad.jpg". Pretty soon you should have the file downloaded to your home computer.

You probably don't want to leave your attachment sitting up on the web. To delete it from your UNIX server, type "cd public_html" and return, followed by "rm " and the name of the attachment, and return. Something like this.

[hblanks@solar hblanks]$ cd public_html
[hblanks@solar public_html]$ rm salad.jpg
[hblanks@solar public_html]$

Or, if you just want to move it back to your home directory:

[hblanks@solar hblanks]$ cd public_html
[hblanks@solar public_html]$ mv salad.jpg ../
[hblanks@solar public_html]$

That's it. If you feel adventurous, you could try doing the same thing with FTP or SCP--it's pretty easy to figure out, too.

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