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List:       cgi-list
Subject:    Re: [CGI] counting msgs in mailbox on same server
From:       Daniel Macks <dmacks () netspace ! org>
Date:       1998-06-22 3:22:34
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Jann Linder said:
: 
: I need a surefire way of opening a mailbox (using the mailbox path, ie: 
: /usr/spool/mail/jann) and placing each msg as an element of an array.
: 
: This is what i have so far..but it doesnt take into account msgs that have 
: the "mail msgs separator" (ie: newline newline "From ") in their bodies...

The "formail" command is good at parsing mailbox files, and understands
how to ignore those bogus "From"s. It can even fork off a command-line for
each message it finds. So my thought was to open a pipeline in which
formail's command is to append \0 (or some other guaranteed-not-to-be-
in-email delimitter) to each message. I'm having trouble making this
more elegant, but the following seems to solve the problem:

  #!/usr/bin/perl

  $/ = "\0";

  open (FH,"formail -ds ender < $mailbox_filename |");  # 1
  @msgs = <FH>;
  close(FH);

  pop @msgs;         # 2
  map chop, @msgs;   # 3
  print scalar (@msgs);

Note 1: I would have liked the command for formail -s to be
  'cat - ; echo "\0"'
but formail (unlike find) doesn't seem to like multiple commands.
My work-around was to write a dinky command "ender":
  #!/bin/csh -f
  cat - ; echo "\000"
The effect is to insert a \0 into the stream between each message.

Note 2: There's a \0 after the last message, so which the read sees
as meaning there's another message to go, which there isn't. 

Note 3: The record-separator is the last character of each message.

dan
-- 
Daniel Macks
dmacks@a.chem.upenn.edu
dmacks@netspace.org
http://www.netspace.org/~dmacks

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