[Tutor] Introduction and ? re: searching the list's archives

[karl d'adamo]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 08:50:21AM -0700, Robert Lilly wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> I know that many of the questions I will want to ask have probably already
> been discussed. So I've downloaded the mbox archive so that I may search
> through it before asking a question. However, I'm not sure what an efficient
> means for searching it may be. Does anyone have any recommendations on how
> to go about searching an mbox archive? I am working primarily under Windows
> 2000, but I have Cygwin installed, so a *nix solution may be viable as well.
> post is off-topic.

how about mutt.  it should come with a full distribution
of cygwin.  it will likely take a few minutes to load a
very large mbox, but you get powerful searches like:

  show me all posts with a subject containing
  "dictionary", a body containing "hashable", that have
  been replied to and are PGP signed from 10/1/01 to
  11/1/01

  ~s dictionary ~b hashable ~Q ~g ~d 1/10/01-1/11/01

see here for a full description of mutt patterns:

    http://mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-4.html#ss4.2

to run it on your file, just type:

  mutt -f <name of mbox>

for messages it finds, you will see them in a nice
threaded format.

if you have multiple mboxes to search there is a nice
program that can search gzipped, bzip2ed mboxes, maildirs
by date and regexes within headers and/or body.  it also
includes a wrapper for mutt or pine called grepmail:

  http://grepmail.sourceforge.net/

wow, i am replying almost a month too late.