On 14Sep2016 16:12, Are Troi <areemt...@gmail.com> wrote:
Last night at a technical talk I lamented the loss around 5 years ago
from Fedora of command-line tools to extract email attachments from a
BASH script and a colleague told me Mutt can do this.
If you mean the MIME tools mpack and munpak, I still use them. (On a Mac, where
the Macports package is called mpack).
Wouldn't you be better off just fetching and buiulding them?
I installed Mutt, checked out the man pages, went through the
documentation, spent an hour or more searching the archives and it is
not at all readily apparent that Mutt can do this, or how.
Mutt is probably a poor match for the task because although it will decode
messages etc, all the saving is interactive. In particular, there's no API for
"iterating" over attachments, let along recursively.
I fired up mutt on an example file and it opens it up just fine, the
problem is having a user drive the user interface defeats the whole
purpose; it must be done programatically. So, I've been looking into
the various libraries that handle MIME - I understand Perl and Python
both have good libraries, though I've been more interested in the Java
one because there are some synergies there - but nevermind all that.
I'd be going for the Python stuff, lacking your context.
My supposition is that if mutt can do it, the only way is to define a
macro, as documented on this page:
https://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/MuttFaq/Attachment
(A brief but hopefully helpful digression is that I've spent a good
bit of time in the documentation and other materials and apparently
there's some tiny little assumption made about macros that is too
obvious to the documentation writer to bother documenting but is
unknwon to a newbie about how / where macros are defined. There's
nothing in the man page, nothing on the on-screen help, and the
documentation apparently assumes you already know how they're defined!
The best help I found so far is the "(ab)use "macros" as variables" on
the wiki under "ConfigTricks" - from that I can probably figure it
out...)
Macros get defined in your config file, with all the other mutt config. Mutt
can be told to use a specific config file instead of the default on the command
line if you wish.
So.. that example was:
macro attach W <save-entry><kill-line>/home/gawron/attachments/ macro
I think the lack of iteration kills the macro approach.
I advocate getting the mpack tools and using them, or writing something using
Python or Java that suits your needs.
...I'm guessing... And I'd launch it like this:
$ cd /dir/where/email/is
$ echo A | mutt -f mailfile.name
...Am I on the right track? What do I expect in the directory? Any
other guidance, please?
I have a macro for mutt bound to:
<pipe-message>mail-open-attachments<enter>
but mail-open-attachments is just a shell script that uses the mpack tools:
https://bitbucket.org/cameron_simpson/css/src/tip/bin/mail-open-attachments
It just makes a scratch directory, unpacks the files, and opened the scratch
directory in the Finder. It is my quick'n'dirty for grabbing what I've been
sent.
Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au>
