MU(EXTRACT) User Manuals MU(EXTRACT)NAME
mu extract is the mu command to display and save message parts (attach‐
ments), and open them with other tools.
SYNOPSIS
mu extract [options] <file>
mu extract [options] <file> <pattern>
DESCRIPTION
mu extract is the mu sub-command for extracting MIME-parts (e.g.,
attachments) from mail messages. The sub-command works on message
files, and does not require the message to be indexed in the database.
For attachments, the file name used when saving it is the name of the
attachment in the message. If there is no such name, or when saving
non-attachment MIME-parts, a name is derived from the message-id of the
message.
If you specify a pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression) as the
second argument, all attachments with filenames matching that pattern
will be extracted. The regular expressions are Perl-compatible (as per
the PCRE-library).
Without any options, mu extract simply outputs the list of leaf MIME-
parts in the message. Only 'leaf' MIME-parts (including RFC822 attach‐
ments) are considered, multipart/* etc. are ignored.
OPTIONS-a, --save-attachments
save all MIME-parts that look like attachments.
--save-all
save all non-multipart MIME-parts.
--parts=<parts>
only consider the following numbered parts (comma-separated
list). The numbers for the parts can be seen from running mu
extract without any options but only the message file.
--target-dir=<dir>
save the parts in the target directory rather than the current
working directory.
--overwrite
overwrite existing files with the same name; by default over‐
writing is not allowed.
--play Try to 'play' (open) the attachment with the default
application for the particular file type. On MacOS, this uses
the open program, on other platforms it uses xdg-open. You can
choose a different program by setting the MU_PLAY_PROGRAM envi‐
ronment variable.
EXAMPLES
To display information about all the MIME-parts in a message file:
$ mu extract msgfile
To extract MIME-part 3 and 4 from this message, overwriting existing
files with the same name:
$ mu extract --parts=3,4 --overwrite msgfile
To extract all files ending in '.jpg' (case-insensitive):
$ mu extract msgfile '.*.jpg'
To extract an mp3-file, and play it in the default mp3-playing applica‐
tion:
$ mu extract --play msgfile 'whoopsididitagain.mp3'
BUGS
Please report bugs if you find them: https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues
AUTHOR
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <djcb@djcbsoftware.nl>
SEE ALSOmu(1)July 2012 1 MU(EXTRACT)
