Re: 'all' folder msgs from last 3 weeks; of symlinks?

[Tom R]

thanks for the help Conrad and Ralph!

Hi Conrad:

On Tue 9/13/22 15:55 +0100 Conrad Hughes wrote:
>> I have many nmh folders, that get filled by procmail. I'd like to
>> have, an 'all' folder that is built by a shell script that could be
>> called by cron daily.  I'd be happy, with all msgs, say from the last
>> 21 days.
>
>Install mairix.  Then
>
>  mairix d:21d-
>
>will fill your +s (or whatever you choose to call it) folder with
>symlinks to emails from the last 21 days.  It'll do a whole lot more
>though since it's a general search engine.  It can even index compressed
>.mmdf archives: it's *great*.

I had mairix installed; and I was doing that -- except that I did not
have a script to easily update the list of all my folders.

I now have something to update ~/.mairixrc with a list of "all" my folders. 
I use something like:

    find ~/Mail -mount -maxdepth 2 -type d -mtime -600 | perl -pe 
's~^.*?/Mail/?~~' | sort # ... pipeline continues ending in a ":" join

--------
Hi Ralph:

On Tue 9/13/22 17:56 +0100 Ralph Corderoy wrote:
>> I have many nmh folders, that get filled by procmail. I'd like to have, an 
>> 'all'
>> folder that is built by a shell script that could be called by cron daily. 
>> I'd be happy, with all msgs, say from the last 21 days. Perhaps this script
>> would remove bad symlinks in 'all' each time it runs.
>
>You're implying you want the ‘files’ in +all to be symlinks rather than
>hard links?  refile(1) can make hard links with -link.

I would be ok with symlinks or hardlinks; but symlinks are better since I could
quickly find which folder the msg first landed in.

>I'd have thought useful parts would be:
>
>    rmf +all
>    folder -create +all
>
>    folder +foo && pick -list -after -21 | xargs -rd\\n refile -link +all
>    folder +bar && pick -list -after -21 | xargs -rd\\n refile -link +all

OK, so I would have to walk through all the folders one by one and run pick.

How about a soln something like

    rmf +all
    folder -create +all

    find ~/Mail -mtime -21 -type f -not -empty -regextype posix-egrep -regex 
'.*/[0-9]+$' |xargs _addmsgs2-nmh-all-folder

    sortm +all

Could the script _addmsgs2-nmh-all-folder use refile?  It seems refile does not
create soft links. I got the soft link thing from mairx I think -- nice because
I can find the orignal folder for the msg easily.

If _addmsgs2-nmh-all-folder did not use refile, my hunch
is I could "rmf +all;folder -create +all", then
add symlinks in naming the first "1", etc; then nmh would magically fix
.mh_sequences -- Right? When/how?  Maybe sortm +all would repair .mh_sequences?

>    sortm +all
>
>If you want symlinks and you want to preserve +all from one run to the
>next but remove the symlinks to files which are now too old whilst
>adding those which are new then comm(1) would be handy.

ok, thanks, I've used comm from time to time. I'm ok with clobbering/rebuilding 
all though.

>> **In this way I could use sort and 'scan' to list the nmh 'all' folder
>> msgs sorted by time.**
>
>One has wondered about the separation of email files into folders and
>sequences, the overlap between the two, and most commands only working
>within a single folder.

Right. Maybe there should be a built in way to get at all msgs.

--
thanks,
Tom