1MU(CFIND) User Manuals MU(CFIND)
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6 mu cfind is the mu command to find contacts in the mu database and
7 export them for use in other programs.
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11 mu cfind [options] [<pattern>]
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15 mu cfind is the mu command for finding contacts (name and e-mail
16 address of people who were either an e-mail's sender or receiver).
17 There are different output formats available, for importing the con‐
18 tacts into other programs.
19
22 When you index your messages (see mu index), mu creates a list of
23 unique e-mail addresses found and the accompanying name, and caches
24 this list. In case the same e-mail address is used with different
25 names, the most recent non-empty name is used.
26 mu cfind starts a search for contacts that match a regular expression.
28 For example:
29 $ mu cfind '@gmail.com'
31 would find all contacts with a gmail-address, while
33 $ mu cfind Mary
35 lists all contacts with Mary in either name or e-mail address.
37 If you do not specify a search expression, mu cfind returns the full
39 list of contacts. Note, mu cfind uses a cache with the e-mail informa‐
40 tion, which is populated during the indexing process.
41 The regular expressions are Perl-compatible (as per the PCRE-library
43 used by GRegex).
44
47 --format=plain|mutt-alias|mutt-ab|wl|org-contact|bbdb|csv
48 sets the output format to the given value. The following are
49 available:
50 | --format= | description |
52 |-------------+-----------------------------------|
53 | plain | default, simple list |
54 | mutt-alias | mutt alias-format |
55 | mutt-ab | mutt external address book format |
56 | wl | wanderlust addressbook format |
57 | org-contact | org-mode org-contact format |
58 | bbdb | BBDB format |
59 | csv | comma-separated values (*) |
60 (*) CSV is not fully standardized, but mu cfind follows some
63 common practices: any double-quote is replaced by a double-dou‐
64 ble quote (thus, "hello" become ""hello"", and fields with com‐
65 mas are put in double-quotes. Normally, this should only apply
66 to name fields.
67 --personal only show addresses seen in messages where one of 'my' e-
70 mail
71 addresses was seen in one of the address fields; this is to
72 exclude addresses only seen in mailing-list messages. See the
73 --my-address parameter in mu index.
74 --after=<timestamp> only show addresses last seen after
77 <timestamp>. <timestamp> is a UNIX time_t value, the number of
78 seconds since 1970-01-01 (in UTC).
79 From the command line, you can use the date command to get this
81 value. For example, only consider addresses last seen after
82 2009-06-01, you could specify
83 --after=`date +%s --date='2009-06-01'`
84
87 mu cfind returns 0 upon successful completion -- that is, at least one
88 contact was found. Anything else leads to a non-zero return value:
89 | code | meaning |
91 |------+--------------------------------|
92 | 0 | ok |
93 | 1 | general error |
94 | 2 | no matches (for 'mu cfind') |
95
98 You can use mu cfind as an external address book server for mutt. For
99 this to work, add the following to your muttrc:
100 set query_command = "mu cfind --format=mutt-ab '%s'"
102 Now, in mutt, you can search for e-mail addresses using the query-com‐
104 mand, which is (by default) accessible by pressing Q.
105
108 mu cfind output is encoded according to the current locale except for
109 --format=bbdb. This is hard-coded to UTF-8, and as such specified in
110 the output-file, so emacs/bbdb can handle things correctly, without
111 guessing.
112
115 Please report bugs if you find them at
116 https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues.
117
120 Dirk-Jan C. Binnema <djcb@djcbsoftware.nl>
121
124 mu(1), mu-index(1), mu-find(1), pcrepattern(3)
125April 2019 1 MU(CFIND)