Herewith two hideously ugly little shell scripts for use when Spotlight refuses to search your mail. Spotlight is a flawed v1.0 implementation of a really good idea and will, I’m sure, be debugged in a near-future release. [Update: The LazyWeb is educating me... these are moving targets.]
My problem is that whereas Mail.app will search my To/From/Subject lines (slowly, and with a really irritating GUI), the “Entire Message” option just doesn’t work, it returns instantly with no results. Yes, I’ve read the hints about making Spotlight re-index, but it just flatly refuses to work for me. Mind you, I have a lot of email, but still, it should at least try.
It turns out I had never really figured out the -print0 and
-0 idioms that a lot of the shell-command stalwarts now have.
Thanks to Malcolm Tredinnick for raising my consciousness.
This lives in $HOME/bin under the name
mailgrep:
#!/bin/sh
find $HOME/Library/Mail/IMAP* -name '*.emlx' -print0 | \
xargs -0 fgrep -i $@Isn’t xargs a funny command? I’ve discovered that it’s nearly
impossible to describe what does, and then why what it does is necessary, but
there are just a whole bunch of places where you’d be lost without it.
This lives in $HOME/bin/mailview:
#!/bin/sh
find $HOME/Library/Mail/IMAP* -name '*.emlx' -print0 | \
xargs -0 fgrep -i -l -Z $@ | \
xargs -0 openThe first cut of this dodged xargs and used an
incredibly-inefficient and slow chain of -exec arguments to open
the files one at a time with
view (aka vim), to work around
a well-known vim misfeature; it complained about the input
not being a terminal and left my Terminal.app keystrokes borked.
But Malcolm, confirming my belief in the broken-ness of vim,
said “Oh, *that* ‘view’. I thought it was some sexy Mac ‘view my email’ app”.
D’oh, of course; the magic OS X open command does just the right
thing.
Erm, you might want to run mailgrep before you run
mailview; I’m not sure what would happen if you asked OS X to
open three or four thousand email messages at once.
