Certainly, the original motivation for ``improving'' my script was so that
the extraneous stuff -- namely, the leading "X-Face:" on the first line
and the trailing newline -- could be removed from ~/.face, so that that
file could be just the literal output of compface. I am by no means
convinced that such an ``improvement'' is a desirable thing; but that
is what people were trying to achieve. And on some systems, with some
versions of echo, the 1.5.0 version did achieve that.
**** DO NOT USE THE 1.5.1 VERSION; IT IS A DISASTER ****
If you use it, the newline that is meant to separate the headers of
your mail from the body will get dropped, and the first part of the
body will be taken as (doubtless illegal) headers, and things will
be very bad.
If you want to use the 1.5.1 version, you can, _only if_ you add an
extra newline to the end of ~/.face. Then it will be OK. But I
thought the whole idea was to avoid doing that.
I would have included a version that did work and was portable, and left
the design questions till later; but the machine I have all that stuff on
is off the Internet, and I thought I should get this information to the
list as quickly as possible.
John.