On Sun Dec 29 1996, Jim Dennis wrote:
Last night I broke my infobot. Now I have
a bunch of messages in my 'procmail.backup'
file that I'd like to spit back through the
procmail file to "re" process.
I know it's possible -- so now I'm hunting
through the man pages to figure it out.
I'll probably blow it on the first try.
Hold on a sec.....
Ahhh, there it is. Let's try:
formail -s /usr/local/bin/procmail < procmail.backup
I probably should have locked that
down before opening it -- but, luckily,
with my feed I don't have to worry about that
much (uucp set to call my feed every hour).
Now, would that be a "basic" or an "advanced" topic.
Basic.
One of the first things I did when I had procmail running and (mh
installed), was to use `formail -s procmail' to explode and sort my
old mail files into various mh folders. It did a great job of that!
(I had previously written an awk script to do much the same thing, but
procmail/formail does a much, MUCH better job! Quicker too:)
Once I saw what this could do, I immediately saw the potential I now
had for using simple command lines like:
% formail -s procmail -m experimental.rc < mailfile
...to do all sorts of nifty things (even "on the fly") to test
procmail recipes and to sort lots of old email I had here.
The `formail -D' facility is also another basic topic. I've been
using it to filter out duplicate email, which gets put into
IN.duplicates. After 2 months, that file is almost 500k in size! :)
As for your mini tutorial and beginner's FAQ ideas etc, Jim, go for
it... procmail _is_ a big animal to tame, and I did feel quite lost
for a long time, and it wasn't until a lot of blood, sweat and tears
had stained my keyboard trying to come to the modest white-belt status
I now have with procmailrc files :-)
Mygod, there's just so much to procmail that going for a black-belt is
almost a lifetime's work! So much to learn about it...
Cheers
Tony