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On Thu, 1 Apr 2010, Roland Tarver wrote:
Hello all :-) Can anyone recommend a command line only address book. I want something fairly simple and efficient for storing basic contact information. All standard stuff like: name, postal address, phone numbers, emails, urls, notes etc. The total number of contacts will never exceed 500 and is just for a single user (me).
This is the sort of classic thing that *nix was very good at way back.. and it still is, but but it did require a lot of experience/learning..
So, for example, the basic colon-separated file: Gordon Henderson:Drogon Towers:TQ11:01364 698 123:gordon@xxxxxxxxxx:http\://www.drogon.net/lines and lines like this can be indexed, sorted, searched, printed and so on with a few simple command-line tools - grep, sort, cut, mayby even awk... and a few shell-scripts to put them together - and, if you need to, it's still plain-text and human readable (and editbale with vim) for when the tools you use fail...
Kids of today wouldn't believe a word of it though :)and for a few 100, or 1000 records you really don't need a fancy SQL-like back-end database at all.
And heres a bit of trivia for you - every address in the UK can be (has to be!) fitted into these fields:
Premises (60 characters max) Thoroughfare (55 characters) Locality (30 characters) Postcode (10 characters)That's the database definition for the address information as required by the emergency handling authority - it's what they have when you make a 999 call!
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html