I am thinking about writing a postproc, using Ken Hornstein's example as a
template (though I will probably use Java rather than bash). It will invoke
whom and examine its output. I can find no documentation about whom's
non-error output format. Here is my conjecture about it.
As an aside: now that I look at the code, I realize that post (which really
does the work for whom(1)), opens /dev/null and writes the headers to it.
Boy, once you know how the sausage is made ...
Each output line (I don't particularly care how lines are delimited) is
exactly one of:
A string beginning with zero or more white space characters followed by a
'-'
A string containing exactly one address as a substring.
Is this conjecture true? If so, can I count on it remaining true?
You can also have an address followed by [BCC]. Also, the address (for
dumb historical reasons) is printed as "user at domain". You can also
in theory have a UUCP address (host!user) but you would have to work
to make that happen, and I don't think you'd actually be able to send it
anywhere if you did. You can also have a "local" address which has
no @ or at.
I don't think we can make any guarantees on the format of that output;
for example, it might change to being simply user@domain. Also, getting
rid of the distinction between local and network users might make sense,
but that would require some more thought. I would simply display the
output to the user and check the exit value.
--Ken
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