MU(CFIND) User Manuals MU(CFIND)NAME
mu cfind is the mu command to find contacts in the mu database and
export them for use in other programs.
SYNOPSIS
mu cfind [options] [<pattern>]
DESCRIPTION
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 con‐
tacts into other programs.
SEARCHING CONTACTS
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 index‐
ing process.
The regular expressions are Perl-compatible (as per the PCRE-library
used by GRegex).
OPTIONS
--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-dou‐
ble quote (thus, "hello" become ""hello"", and fields with com‐
mas 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'`
RETURN VALUE
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') |
INTEGRATION WITH MUTT
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.
ENCODING
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.
BUGS
Please report bugs if you find them at
https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues.
AUTHOR
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <djcb@djcbsoftware.nl>
SEE ALSOmu(1)mu-index(1)mu-find(1)pcrepattern(3)May 2013 1 MU(CFIND)
