The man-page sources use single quotes to quote text. However, this can be problematic in man-pages because if a single quote appears at the beginning of a line the following word is interpreted by troff as a macro. For example, this paragraph in mu-easy.7: What if we want to see some of the body of the message? You can get a 'summary' of the first lines of the message using the \fI\-\-summary\-len\fP option, which will 'summarize' the first \fIn\fP lines of the message: elicits this warning: $ man --warnings obj-x86_64-linux-gnu/man/mu-easy.7 >/dev/null troff:<standard input>:166: warning: macro 'summarize'' not defined and gets truncated: What if we want to see some of the body of the message? You can get a 'summary' of the first lines of the message using the --summary-len op‐ tion, which will One could adjust the line-wrapping to move the quoted text away from the beginning of the line, but that is fragile. Another possibility would be to use the troff escape-sequences for open and close quotes (`\(oq` and `\(cq` respectively), but ox-man is being used precisely to avoid having to handle troff directly. Instead use back-ticks for left quotes. Thus: What if we want to see some of the body of the message? You can get a `summary' of the first lines of the message using the \fI\-\-summary\-len\fP option, which will `summarize' the first \fIn\fP lines of the message: which is rendered correctly: What if we want to see some of the body of the message? You can get a `summary' of the first lines of the message using the --summary-len op- tion, which will `summarize' the first n lines of the message: Signed-off-by: Jeremy Sowden <azazel@debian.org>
10 KiB
MU FIND
NAME
mu-find - find e-mail messages in the mu database.
SYNOPSIS
mu [common-options] find [options] <search expression>
DESCRIPTION
mu find is the mu command for searching e-mail message that were stored earlier using mu index(1).
SEARCHING MAIL
mu find starts a search for messages in the database that match some search pattern. The search patterns are described in detail in mu-query(7).
For example:
$ mu find subject:snow and date:2009..
would find all messages in 2009 with `snow' in the subject field, e.g:
2009-03-05 17:57:33 EET Lucia <lucia@example.com> running in the snow 2009-03-05 18:38:24 EET Marius <marius@foobar.com> Re: running in the snow
Note, this the default, plain-text output, which is the default, so you don't have to use –format=plain. For other types of output (such as symlinks, XML or s-expressions), see the discussion in the OPTIONS-section below about –format.
The search pattern is taken as a command-line parameter. If the search parameter consists of multiple parts (as in the example) they are treated as if there were a logical and between them.
For details on the possible queries, see mu-query(7).
FIND OPTIONS
Note, some of the important options are described in the *mu*(1) man-page and not here, as they apply to multiple mu-commands.
The find-command has various options that influence the way mu displays the
results. If you don't specify anything, the defaults are fields="d f s"
,
--sortfield=date
and --reverse
.
-f, –fields=<fields>
specifies a string that determines which fields are shown in the output. This string consists of a number of characters (such as 's' for subject or 'f' for from), which will replace with the actual field in the output. Fields that are not known will be output as-is, allowing for some simple formatting.
For example:
$ mu find subject:snow --fields "d f s"
lists the date, subject and sender of all messages with `snow' in the their subject.
The table of replacement characters is superset of the list mentions for search parameters, such as:
t *t*o: recipient d Sent *d*ate of the message f Message sender (*f*rom:) g Message flags (fla*g*s) l Full path to the message (*l*ocation) s Message *s*ubject i Message-*i*d m *m*aildir
For the complete list, try the command: mu info fields
.
The message flags are described in mu-query(7). As an example, a message which is `seen', has an attachment and is signed would have `asz' as its corresponding output string, while an encrypted new message would have `nx'.
-s, –sortfield=<field> and -z,–reverse
specify the field to sort the search results by and the direction (i.e., `reverse' means that the sort should be reverted - Z-A). Examples include:
cc,c Cc (carbon-copy) recipient(s) date,d Message sent date from,f Message sender maildir,m Maildir msgid,i Message id prio,p Nessage priority subject,s Message subject to,t To:-recipient(s)
For the complete list, try the command: mu info fields
.
Thus, for example, to sort messages by date, you could specify:
$ mu find fahrrad --fields "d f s" --sortfield=date --reverse
Note, if you specify a sortfield, by default, messages are sorted in reverse (descending) order (e.g., from lowest to highest). This is usually a good choice, but for dates it may be more useful to sort in the opposite direction.
-n, –maxnum=<number>
If > 0, display maximally that number of entries. If not specified, all matching entries are displayed.
–summary-len=<number>
If > 0, use that number of lines of the message to provide a summary.
–format=<plain|links|xml|sexp>
output results in the specified format:
- The default is plain, i.e normal output with one line per message.
- links outputs the results as a maildir with symbolic links to the found messages. This enables easy integration with mail-clients (see below for more information).
- xml formats the search results as XML.
- sexp formats the search results as an s-expression as used in Lisp programming environments
–linksdir=<dir> and -c, –clearlinks
when using -format=links
, output the results as a maildir with symbolic links to
the found messages. This enables easy integration with mail-clients (see below
for more information). mu will create the maildir if it does not exist yet.
If you specify --clearlinks
, existing symlinks will be cleared from the target
directories; this allows for re-use of the same maildir. However, this option
will delete any symlink it finds, so be careful.
$ mu find grolsch --format=links --linksdir=~/Maildir/search --clearlinks
stores links to found messages in ~/Maildir/search
. If the directory does not
exist yet, it will be created. Note: when mu creates a Maildir for these links,
it automatically inserts a .noindex
file, to exclude the directory from mu
index.
–after=<timestamp>
only show messages whose message files were last modified (mtime) after
<timestamp>
. <timestamp>
is a UNIX time_t value, the number of seconds since
1970-01-01 (in UTC).
From the command line, you can use the date command to get this value. For example, only consider messages modified (or created) in the last 5 minutes, you could specify
--after=`date +%s --date='5 min ago'`
This is assuming the GNU date command.
–exec=<command>
the --exec
coption causes the command
to be executed on each matched message;
for example, to see the raw text of all messages matching `milkshake', you could
use:
$ mu find milkshake --exec='less'
which is roughly equivalent to:
$ mu find milkshake --fields="l" | xargs less
-b, –bookmark=<bookmark>
use a bookmarked search query. Using this option, a query from your bookmark file will be prepended to other search queries. See mu-bookmarks(5) for the details of the bookmarks file.
-u, –skip-dups
whenever there are multiple messages with the same message-id field, only show the first one. This is useful if you have copies of the same message, which is a common occurrence when using e.g. Gmail together with offlineimap.
-r, –include-related
include messages being referred to by the matched messages – i.e.. include messages that are part of the same message thread as some matched messages. This is useful if you want Gmail-style `conversations'.
-t, –threads
show messages in a `threaded' format – that is, with indentation and arrows showing the conversation threads in the list of matching messages. When using this, sorting is chronological (by date), based on the newest message in a thread.
Messages in the threaded list are indented based on the depth in the discussion, and are prefix with a kind of arrow with thread-related information about the message, as in the following table:
| | normal | orphan | duplicate | |-------------+--------+--------+-----------| | first child | `-> | `*> | `=> | | other | |-> | |*> | |=> |
Here, an `orphan' is a message without a parent message (in the list of matches), and a duplicate is a message whose message-id was already seen before; not this may not really be the same message, if the message-id was copied.
The algorithm used for determining the threads is based on Jamie Zawinksi's description: http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html
-a,–analyze
instead of executing the query, analyze it by show the parse-tree s-expression
and a stringified version of the Xapian query. This can help users to determine
how mu
interprets some query.
The output of this command are differ between versions, but should be helpful nevertheless.
INTEGRATION
It is possible to integrate mu find with some mail clients
mutt
For mutt you can use the following in your muttrc
; pressing the F8 key will
start a search, and F9 will take you to the results.
# mutt macros for mu macro index <F8> "<shell-escape>mu find --clearlinks --format=links --linksdir=~/Maildir/search " \\ "mu find" macro index <F9> "<change-folder-readonly>~/Maildir/search" \\ "mu find results"
Wanderlust
Sam B suggested the following on the mu-mailing list. First add the following to your Wanderlust configuration file:
(require 'elmo-search) (elmo-search-register-engine 'mu 'local-file :prog "/usr/local/bin/mu" ;; or wherever you've installed it :args '("find" pattern "--fields" "l") :charset 'utf-8) (setq elmo-search-default-engine 'mu) ;; for when you type "g" in folder or summary. (setq wl-default-spec "[")
Now, you can search using the g key binding; you can also create permanent
virtual folders when the messages matching some expression by adding something
like the following to your folders
file.
VFolders { [date:today..now]!mu "Today" [size:1m..100m]!mu "Big" [flag:unread]!mu "Unread" }
After restarting Wanderlust, the virtual folders should appear.
ENCODING
mu find output is encoded according to the locale for --format=plain
(the
default format), and UTF-8 for all other formats (sexp
, xml
).
PERFORMANCE
Some notes on performance, comparing the timings between some recent releases; taking the total number for 10 test runs.
- time (repeat 10 mu find "" -n 50000 > /dev/null)
- time (repeat 10 mu find "" -n 50000 –include-related –threads > /dev/null)
release | time 1 (sec) | time 2 (sec) |
---|---|---|
1.4 | 8.9s | 59.3s |
1.6 | 8.3s | 27.5s |
1.8 | 8.7s | 29.3s |
1.10 | 9.8s | 30.6s |
1.11 (master) | 10.1s | 29.5s |
SEE ALSO
mu(1), mu-index(1), mu-query(7), mu-info(1)