mu-cfind (1)

mu cfind [options] [<pattern>]

mu cfind is the mu command for finding contacts (name and e-mail address of people who were either an e-mail's sender or receiver). There are different output formats available, for importing the contacts into other programs.

When you index your messages (see mu index), mu creates a list of unique e-mail addresses found and the accompanying name, and caches this list. In case the same e-mail address is used with different names, the most recent non-empty name is used.

mu cfind starts a search for contacts that match a regular expression. For example:

   $ mu cfind '@gmail.com'

would find all contacts with a gmail-address, while

   $ mu cfind Mary

lists all contacts with Mary in either name or e-mail address.

If you do not specify a search expression, mu cfind returns the full list of contacts. Note, mu cfind does not use the database, but uses a cache file with e-mail addresses, which is populated during the indexing process.

The regular expressions are Perl-compatible (as per the PCRE-library used by GRegex).

--format=plain|mutt-alias|mutt-ab|wl|org-contact|bbdb|csv

sets the output format to the given value. The following are available:

| --format=   | description                       |
|-------------+-----------------------------------|
| plain       | default, simple list              |
| mutt-alias  | mutt alias-format                 |
| mutt-ab     | mutt external address book format |
| wl          | wanderlust addressbook format     |
| org-contact | org-mode org-contact format       |
| bbdb        | BBDB format                       |
| csv         | comma-separated values (*)	  |

(*) CSV is not really standardized, but mu cfind follows some common practices: any double-quote is replaced by a double-double quote (thus, "hello" become ""hello"", and fields with commas are put in double-quotes. Normally, this should only apply to name fields.

--personal only show addresses seen in messages where one of 'my'

e-mail addresses was seen in one of the address fields; this is to exclude addresses only seen in mailing-list messages. See the --my-address parameter in mu index.

--after=<timestamp> only show addresses last seen after

<timestamp>. <timestamp> is a UNIX time_t value, the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 (in UTC).

From the command line, you can use the date command to get this value. For example, only consider addresses last seen after 2009-06-01, you could specify

  --after=`date +%s --date='2009-06-01'`

mu cfind returns 0 upon successful completion -- that is, at least one contact was found. Anything else leads to a non-zero return value:

| code | meaning                        |
|------+--------------------------------|
|    0 | ok                             |
|    1 | general error                  |
|    2 | no matches (for 'mu cfind')    |

You can use mu cfind as an external address book server for mutt. For this to work, add the following to your muttrc:

set query_command = "mu cfind --format=mutt-ab '%s'"

Now, in mutt, you can easily search for e-mail addresses using the query-command, which is (by default) accessible by pressing Q.

mu cfind output is encoded according to the current locale except for --format=bbdb. This is hard-coded to UTF-8, and as such specified in the output-file, so emacs/bbdb can handle things correctly, without guessing.

Please report bugs if you find them at http://code.google.com/p/mu0/issues/list.

Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <[email protected]>

mu(1) mu-index(1) mu-find(1) pcrepattern(3)