Other Commonly Used Commands

Following is a list of commands that might prove useful to you once you are subscribed to FINAID-L. 

Note: All commands are sent to Listserv@lists.psu.edu. Send only the command text, housed in the body of text of the email message, and exclude signatures and other forms of miscellaneous text.  Each command can be abbreviated using the capitalized portion. 

SUBscribe/UNSUBscribe

An alternative to subscribing as described in The Basics.  Include an institutional affiliation if you'd like.

SUB FINAID-L YourFirstName YourLastName, Your Institution

Example: Sub FINAID-L George W. Bush, POTUS

 

Mail/NOMail

Controls the flow of mail to your subscription address.  These commands essentially "turn on" and "turn off" your mail.  Your subscription stays intact.

To suspend your mail:

Set FINAID-L Nomail

And to resume mail distributions:

Set FINAID-L Mail

 

DIGest/NODIGest

Instead of receiving individual FINAID-L distributions (since we
have posted more than 5200 messages per year) you may elect to
receive them as a daily digest.  FINAID-L will produce a digest at 11:55 p.m. each day, or whenever a threshold of 1750 total posted lines is exceeded.

Set FINAID-L Digest

If you find that you would prefer to switch back to individual
e-mail distributions, then send the following text to LISTSERV

Set FINAID-L Nodigest

INDex/NOINDex 

Requests that a subject oriented index of postings be mailed to you and provides a means for you to request one or more of the original postings.

Set FINAID-L Index

If you find that you would prefer to switch back to individual
e-mail distributions, then send the following text to LISTSERV

Set FINAID-L Noindex

Query

Use this command to find the status of your subscription.  Your subscription name, email address, and various settings are returned.  Note: If the results of submitting this command tells you that you are not subscribed, then you really aren't subscribed, or else your email address has changed since you first subscribed causing Listserv to not recognize you.

Query FINAID-L

SUBJECT/NOSUBJECT

Requests that Listserv affix a text string preface of [FINAID-L]  to each SUBJECT line for received postings.

Set FINAID-L Subject

Example Subject:  [FINAID-L] Computers in the COA

And to reverse this action:

Set FINAID-L NoSubject

Search

A simple method for searching through archived FINAID-L messages. The format for the search command is as follows:

SEArch FINAID-L  word1 <word2 <...>>             Search list archives


or word1 <word2 <...>> IN FINAID-L
FROM date1                                                    -> From this date
TODAY                                                           -> From today
TODAY-7                                                        -> In the last 7 days
TO date2                                                        -> To this date
WHERE
SUBJECT CONTAINS xxxx                                  -> Only this subject
AND/OR
SENDER CONTAINS xxxx                                   -> Only this author
                                                                        Complex boolean
                                                                        operations are
                                                                        supported, see database
                                                                        guide

LISTSERV tells you which postings matched your search criteria and shows you some of the matching lines of text from those messages. It also furnishes the exact command for you to use to retrieve the full text of those messages. Using this example, sending the following command (as an example) to LISTSERV@LISTS.PSU.EDU

GETPOST FINAID-L 5533 5629 5773

would request each of the three matching postings be sent to you. If you
didn't want all three, you could remove the appropriate item #s from the
GETPOST command.

Some Sample Searches:

Search IFAP in FINAID-L
Search Computer and Costs in FINAID-L
Search FAFSA and Water in FINAID-L since August

A web interface is also available for searching the FINAID-L archives.  It is available at http://lists.psu.edu/archives/finaid-l.html.  It is very easy to use, but requires that you establish a user id (your email address) and a password to use it.

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Send mail to FINAID-L-Request@lists.psu.edu with questions or comments about this web site or operations of the list itself.
Last modified: September 12, 2001