For one-off's like that, it's impossible. You know that as well as I do;
the mboxrd/mboxo formats are simpler to parse when you're doing an
extremely simple thing like that.
But it doesn't matter. People usually parse mailboxes to do more complex
things, and the amount of additional code to handle content-length is
usually insignificant compared to the overall amount of code.
And yes, this is a subjective measurement, no more or less than the
original statement.
And this ends my comments on the topic.
Tony
D. J. Bernstein wrote:
Tony Hansen writes:
Whether parsing mboxcl2 takes "much" more code than parsing mboxrd is a
subjective measurement.
Here's complete awk code to count the number of messages in an mbox,
assuming mboxrd (or mboxo) format:
awk '/^From / { ++sum } END { print sum }'
Please show us your code to do the same thing with mboxcl2.
Remember that, if you don't check Content-Length, you'll sometimes break
messages at the wrong place. Also remember that Content-Length can be
capitalized and spaced strangely, maybe even across lines.