Subject: Composing mail to all entries in addressbook

From: "Ari Y. Weintraub" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 22:43:15 -0400

Is there any way in Pine 3.94 to compose mail to all of the entries in my
addressbook. For example, I recently changed my phone number and would
like to send one message to everybody with the new number. I can't find a
way to do this - does anyone out there have any idea? TIA

Be typin' to ya'!
<ARI>

Ari Weintraub	MSI	University of Maryland School of Medicine
427 Yeshiva Lane	Baltimore, MD 21208
(410)415-5919		[email-masked]

   Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human
          intelligence long enough to get money from it.
          --Stephen Butler Leacock

---

From: [email-masked] (William Burrow)
Date: 13 Sep 1996 22:49:40 GMT

Ari Y. Weintraub ([email-masked]) wrote:
: Is there any way in Pine 3.94 to compose mail to all of the entries in my
: addressbook. For example, I recently changed my phone number and would
: like to send one message to everybody with the new number. I can't find a
: way to do this - does anyone out there have any idea? TIA

This would be a nice suggestion for Pine, however, you can do pretty much
the same in Unix using the following awk script.  Copy everything between the
lines into a file named:  everyone 

-------------%< clip --------------
{
    printf("everyone\tEveryone\t(");  
  
    if ( $0 ~ /\(/ )
        continue
    else
        printf("%s", $1);  

    while ( getline > 0 ) {
        if ( $0 ~ /\(/ )
            continue
        else
            printf(",%s", $1);
    }
    printf(")\n"); 
}
-------------%< clip --------------

Now, type the following exactly at the Unix prompt:

awk -f everyone < ~/.addressbook >> ~/.addressbook && echo Done.

You may wish to first copy your ~/.addressbook file to a backup file, 
before executing this command. 

If everything went well, it should say Done.  When you start Pine, there
should now be a list in your address book with the name:  everyone,
containing all of your address book nicknames (but NOT other lists). 

--
--
William Burrow  --  Fredericton Area Network