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### 4.2 Ranges

Many commands that operate on individual messages, such as `mh-forward` or `mh-refile-msg` take a `RANGE` argument. This argument can be used in several ways.

If you provide the prefix argument `C-u` to these commands, then you will be prompted for the message range. This can be any valid MH range which can include messages, sequences (see Sequences), and the abbreviations (described in the `mh`(1) man page):

‘`<num1>-<num2>`’

  Indicates all messages in the range <num1> to <num2>, inclusive. The range must be nonempty.

‘`<num>:N`’
‘`<num>:+N`’
‘`<num>:-N`’

  Up to N messages beginning with (or ending with) message num. Num may be any of the predefined symbols: first, prev, cur, next or last.

‘`first:N`’
‘`prev:N`’
‘`next:N`’
‘`last:N`’

  The first, previous, next or last messages, if they exist.

‘`all`’

  All of the messages.

For example, a range that shows all of these things is ‘`1 2 3 5-10 last:5 unseen`’.

If the option `transient-mark-mode` is turned on and you set a region in the MH-Folder buffer, then the MH-E command will perform the operation on all messages in that region.

The ‘`mh-range`’ customization group contains a single option which affects how ranges are interpreted.

`mh-interpret-number-as-range-flag`

  On means interpret a number as a range (default: ‘`on`’).

Since one of the most frequent ranges used is ‘`last:N`’, MH-E will interpret input such as ‘`200`’ as ‘`last:200`’ if the `mh-interpret-number-as-range-flag` option is on (which is the default). If you need to scan just the message 200, then use the range ‘`200:1`’ or ‘`200-200`’.

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