[Alpine-info] weird behavior in saving messages from one folder to another

[Jacob Wegelin]

I went into saved-messages, which contained 2156 messages.

$ d  -- to sort them by date

The first few messages look like this:

   A    1 02/26/2003 james levy                                    (25K) Re: seeking Swiss German language instruction 
+ A    2 02/26/2003 james levy                                    (19K) Re: seeking Swiss German language instruction 
+ A    3 02/26/2003 james levy                                    (21K) Re: seeking Swiss German language instruction 
+      4 06/06/2007 Debie Schilling                                (5K) Requesting your May CTSC / CCRC Activity Reports 
+      5 08/09/2007 Elaine Odell

Then I did

; a  -- to select all

a s saved2008_06_30  y -- to save a copy of every message in the newly-sorted message folder to a new folder, which is supposed to be sorted by date.

Then I went into saved2008_06_30  and did

ctrl w ctrl y -- to go to the first few messages. This is what I see:


        1 08/28/2007 Mail Delivery System                           (2K) Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender 
+ A    2 Jan  4     Ryan Schmidt                                   (6K) Re: error installing DarwinPorts or MacPorts: no acceptable C compiler 
-      3 Jan  5     To: apu1 at weibell.no                            (8K) Re: [Alpine-info] how to set up alpine to receive and send email 
+ A    4 Jan  5     macports-users-request at lists.macosforge.org    (3K) confirm 16400e633959fc13453a2da52453baeff28cdadd 
+      5 Jan  5     macports-users-bounces at lists.macosforge.org    (2K) You have been unsubscribed from the macports-users mailing list 
-      6 Jan  5     To: Ryan Schmidt


Both folders have the same number of messages. It appears that no messages have been *dropped*; it's just that in the process of copying them to a new  folder, they are unsorted, or re-sorted.

Is there a better way to permanently sort the messages in a pine "folder"?

Jake

Jacob A. Wegelin
jwegelin at vcu.edu 
Assistant Professor
Department of Biostatistics
Virginia Commonwealth University
730 East Broad Street Room 3006
P. O. Box 980032
Richmond VA 23298-0032
U.S.A. 
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~jwegelin