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From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: perl version of from(1)
Message-ID: <1991May20.181507.13801@convex.com>
Date: 20 May 91 18:15:07 GMT
References: <azioL/5ej/g.c@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account)
Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
Lines: 59
Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com

From the keyboard of subbarao@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kartik Subbarao):
:Anyone know of a cooler way to do this?
:
:#! /usr/princeton/bin/perl
:
:open(mail, $ENV{'MAIL'}) || exit;
:
:while (<mail>) {
:    if (/^From /) {      # Note this is different from From:
:        chop ($out = $_); print $out;
:        while (<mail>) {
:            if (/^$/) { 
:                print "\n"; 
:                last; 
:            }
:            if (/^Subject:/) {
:                chop;
:                @subj = split(/[: ]/,$_);
:                print ' "'.$subj[2].'"'."\n";
:                last;
:            }
:        }
:    }
:}

Cooler?  Hmm...  Well, here's you I added:

    default open to /usr/spool/mail/$USER unless $MAIL set
    accept command line arguments for from filters 
    make everything line up prettier
    be case insensitive
    strip local domain from hostname
    don't stop on first subject line lest there be more
    removed unneeded split and chops
    reduced the line count by 4 for job security through obscurity :-)

Here's the code:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    open (MAIL, $ENV{'MAIL'} || '/usr/spool/mail/'.$ENV{'USER'}) || exit;
    $only = join('|', @ARGV);
    $domain = '\.convex\.com';
    while (<MAIL>) {
	if (s/^from\s+//i) {       		# start of message
	    @ARGV && (/$only/io || next);
	    s/$domain//io if $domain;
	    printf "%-18s %-25s", /(\S+)\s+(.*)/;
	    while (<MAIL>) {
		/^$/ && (print("\n"), last);
		s/^subject:\s*(.*)\n$/"$1"/i  && print;
	    }
	}
    }


--tom
--
Tom Christiansen		tchrist@convex.com	convex!tchrist
		"So much mail, so little time."