Re: Advantages/disadvantages of various mbox types
On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 10:13:19AM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Chris Green wrote:
> > Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> > > Now here I would disagree - I don't see much difference between:
> > > grep foo /var/spool/mail/me
> > > and:
> > > grep -r foo ~/Maildir/
> >
> > That won't work will it? Ah, you're too Linux centred, grep doesn't
> > have the -r option on systems such as the Solaris box which is my
> > desktop machine at work.
>
> What does the linux have to do with grep? Linux is a kernel. Grep is
> a command line utility. The above commands work fine for me on my
> HP-UX machine which has nothing to do with linux.
>
OK, GNU/Linux, I know Linux is the kernel but all Linux distributions
come with the GNU utilities and people,who use Linux think that the
GNU utilities are standard across all Unix systems. This is true to
an extent but I sometimes get bitten by the odd differences.
> True that the GNU grep -r extension is not portable. But it is
> convenient. And you can always install the GNU utilities on your
> system.
>
I can, but as I said previously this is a work system so I can't do
quite exactly what I like with it. It is often a requirement that our
systems are 'very standard' which, in our case, means default Solaris
utilities.
> The portable way is more typing. If you do that a lot you would
> probably make a helper script out of it.
>
> find ~/Maildir -type f -print | xargs grep foo /dev/null
>
Yes, OK, there are of course ways to do it portably. However the
default is that mbox is actually easier to deal with on an unmodified
system. I run mutt in several different places on different operating
systems. The easier I can make things for myself without customising
the system the better.
--
Chris Green (chris@xxxxxxxxxxx)
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."