I wound up with this. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/bguo
Each contact is a single file, like this one, http://src.thomaslevine.com/bguo/artifact/f24d0f9bdbf3f76e and they must all be in the same directory, like this one. http://src.thomaslevine.com/bguo/dir?ci=tip&name=example/orig.bguo This is the main command that I personally use. bguo export directory-with-my-bguo-contacts mh > ~/.aliases It is implemented in Python because that's the only language I know well enough. The file format is close to RFC 2822 because there's a standard Python library for that. vCard and ppl have some interesting fields, like birthday. Maybe I'll add them if I find some place I want to export them to. Here is my original inquiry from 09 Nov 2016, in case people do not recall the thread. > I want to keep track of some information about people, and I have an > idea of what I want the user interface to be like. Perhaps is there > already something close to what I want? > > I want to record the following information about each contact. > > * Name > * Phone number > * Email address > * Postal address > > I want each contact to have its own file. I will put all of the > contacts' files in a directory tree. I can look up contacts by filename > or with a search. (grep will probably be fine.) The software would do > the following. > > * Check that I have formatted the contacts' files properly. > * Convert into formats for other programs (my email client, notably) > > If I don't get any other ideas, I will probably write something that > uses vCard as the format. vCard is nice because search engines (like > recoll) will likely recognize it. The main thing I'm wondering is > whether there is a nicer format that vCard. Belated happy solstice