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Suspending Pine in Unix

What is Suspending?

Almost all Unix programs can be suspended so as to go back to the Unix prompt without having to quit the program. In pine, this can be convenient for a number of reasons, such as when:

• you get a disk quota complaint -- such as when trying to save a mail message or when you send a message and pine's attempt to write the "fcc" (file carbon copy) to your sent-mail folder fails

  In such a case, you need to be able to delete some files to free up some disk space, and getting out and back into pine without losing your current inbox status can be very convenient.

• you are using a terminal program that won't print or scroll the text, so you have to export pine messages to your Unix account and then cat them to be able to capture the text.

  In such a case, being able to drop out of pine temporarily to do this with each message as it comes up is a huge advantage over saving them all in different files and doing it all after leaving pine.

Pine will permit you to use the standard Unix suspend operator: control-Z -- if you turn the feature on.

Setting up Pine for Suspension

To turn on the pine feature (enable-suspend) which allows you to suspend the program do the following:

1. Type m to take you to the main menu.
2. Then type s to get to the Setup portion of pine.
3. Next, type c to get to the configure portion of pine.
4. Now type w which will give you a "Word to find" field at the bottom of the screen.
5. Type susp (for suspend) in the field provided and hit enter. You will be taken to the line where enable-suspend appears.
6. To enable the suspend feature of pine type x while you have the enable-suspend line highlighted. An "X" should appear in the brackets next to enable-suspend.
7. To enable the changes type e and then type y to confirm. This will take you back to the main menu of pine.

How to use Suspend Pine

Once you have gone through the setup process above, you can move in or out of pine as follows:

• To suspend pine type control-Z, this will put pine in the background. You will get the message:
  Pine suspended. Give the "fg" command to come back. Suspended (signal)
• Type fg to return from the Unix prompt to pine (without having to go through the wait of opening your inbox)

A few warnings

Using the suspend feature can catch you off guard in a few ways:

1. Logging out -- If you forget you've left pine suspended and type logout to try to log out, most Unix systems won't permit you to do so without warning you with a message like There are suspended jobs
   

   To logout, you can either

   1. type logout again to force the issue, or
   2. use fg to return to your suspended job (pine) and quit before logging out.
2. Reading mail on a remote system (such as Mail@umd) -- If you do this and then suspend, and ignore the message

   Warning: Your IMAP connection will be closed if Pine
   is suspended for more than 30 minutes

   you WILL lose the connection if you spend to much time at the Unix prompt or in other programs.
3. Mistyping control-A or control-X -- It is obviously very easy to hit a Z when you are trying to type A or X while trying to go to the beginning of a line or save a document. So if you unexpectedly find yourself at a Unix prompt in the middle of a pine session, that's probably what happened. Just use fg to get back.