lbdbq - query program for the little brother's database

lbdbq something

lbdbq [-v|--version|-h|--help]

lbdbq is the client program for the little brother's database. It will attempt to invoke various modules to gather information about persons matching something. E.g., it may look at a list of addresses from which you have received mail, it may look at YP maps, or it may try to finger something@<various hosts>.

The behavior is configurable: Upon startup, lbdbq will source the shell scripts: /etc/lbdb.rc

$HOME/.lbdbrc

$HOME/.lbdb/lbdbrc

$HOME/.lbdb/rc if they exist.

They can be used to set the following global variables:

MODULES_PATH

a space separated list of directories, where lbdbq should look for modules.

METHODS

a space separated list of the modules to use.

SORT_OUTPUT

If you set this to false or no, lbdbq won't sort the addresses but returns them in reverse order (which means that the most recent address in m_inmail database is first). If you set this to name, lbdbq sorts the output by real name. If you set this to comment, it sort the output by the comment (for example the date in m_inmail). If you set this to address, lbdbq sorts the output by addresses (that's the default).

KEEP_DUPES

If you set this to true or yes, lbdbq won't remove duplicate addresses with different real name comment fields.

Note that there are defaults, so you should most probably modify these variables using constructs like this:

       MODULES_PATH="$MODULES_PATH $HOME/lbdb_modules"

Additionally, modules may have configuration variables of their own.

Currently, the following modules are supplied with lbdb:

m_finger

This module will use finger to find out something more about a person. The list of hosts do be asked is configurable; use the M_FINGER_HOSTS variable. Note that "localhost" will mean an invocation of your local finger(1) binary, and should thus work even if you don't provide the finger service to the network. m_finger tries to find out the machines mail domain name in /etc/mailname, by parsing a sendmail.cf file (if it finds one) and by reading /etc/hostname and /etc/HOSTNAME. If you know that this fails on your machine, or you want to force lbdbq to consider some other name to be the local mail domain name (misconfigured SUNs come to mind here), you can specify a name using the MAIL_DOMAIN_NAME variable. If this variable is set by you, no probing will be done by lbdbq.

m_inmail

This module will look up user name fragments in a list of mail addresses created by lbdb-fetchaddr(1).

m_passwd

This module searches for matching entries in your local /etc/passwd file. It evaluates the local machine mail domain in the same way m_finger does. If you set PASSWD_IGNORESYS=true, this module ignores all system accounts and only finds UIDs between 1000 and 29999 (all other UIDs are reserved on a Debian system).

m_yppasswd

This module searches for matching entries in the NIS password database using the command ``ypcat passwd''.

m_nispasswd

This module searches for matching entries in the NIS+ password database using the command ``niscat passwd.org_dir''.

m_getent

This module searches for matching entries in whatever password database is configured using the command ``getent passwd''.

m_pgp2, m_pgp5, m_gpg

These modules scan your PGP 2.*, PGP 5.* or GnuPG public key ring for data. They use the programs pgp(1), pgpk(1), or gpg(1) to get the data.

m_fido

This module searches your Fido nodelist, stored in $HOME/.lbdb/nodelist created by nodelist2lbdb(1).

m_abook

This module uses the program abook(1), a text based address book application to search for addresses. You can define multiple abook address books by setting the variable ABOOK_FILES to a space separated list.

m_addr_email

This module uses the program addr-email(1), a text based frontend to the Tk addressbook(1) application.

m_muttalias

This module searches the variable MUTTALIAS_FILES (a space separated list) of files in MUTT_DIRECTORY that contain mutt aliases. File names without leading slash will have MUTT_DIRECTORY (defaults to $HOME/.mutt or $HOME, if $HOME/.mutt does not exist) prepended before the file name. Absolute file names (beginning with /) will be taken direct.

m_pine

This module searches pine(1) addressbook files for aliases. To realize this it first inspects the variable PINERC. If it isn't set, the default `/etc/pine.conf /etc/pine.conf.fixed .pinerc' is used. To suppress inspecting the PINERC variable, set it to no. It than takes all address-book and global-address-book entries from these pinerc files and adds the contents of the variable PINE_ADDRESSBOOKS to the list, which defaults to `/etc/addressbook .addressbook'. Then these addressbooks are searched for aliases. All filenames without leading slash are searched in $HOME.

m_palm

This module searches the Palm address database using the Palm::PDB(3pm) and Palm::Address(3pm) Perl modules from CPAN. It searches in the variable PALM_ADDRESS_DATABASE or if this isn't set in $HOME/.jpilot/AddressDB.pdb.

m_gnomecard

This module searches for addresses in your GnomeCard database files. The variable GNOMECARD_FILES is a whitespace separated list of GnomeCard data files. If this variable isn't defined, the module searches in $HOME/.gnome/GnomeCard for the GnomeCard database or at least falls back to $HOME/.gnome/GnomeCard.gcrd. If a filename does not start with a slash, it is prefixed with $HOME/.

m_bbdb

This module searches for addresses in your (X)Emacs BBDB (big brother database). It doesn't access ~/.bbdb directly (yet) but calls emacs(1) or xemacs(1) with a special mode to get the information (so don't expect too much performance in this module). You can configure the EMACS variable to tell this module which emacsen to use. Otherwise it will fall back to emacs or xemacs.

m_ldap

This module queries an LDAP server using the Net::LDAP(3pm) Perl modules from CPAN. It can be configured using an external resource file /etc/lbdb_ldap.rc You can explicity define a LDAP query in this file or you can use one or more of the predefined queries from the %ldap_server_db in this file. For this you have to define a space separated list of nicknames from entries in the variable LDAP_NICKS.

m_wanderlust

This module searches for addresses stored in your $WANDERLUST_ADDRESSES (or by default in $HOME/.addresses) file, an addressbook of WanderLust.

m_osx_addressbook

This module queries the OS X AddressBook. It is only available on OS X systems.

m_evolution

This module queries the Ximian Evolution address book. It depends on the program evolution-addressbook-export, which is shipped with evolution.

m_vcf

This module uses libvformat to search for addresses from the space-separated set of vCard files defined in $VCF_FILES.

Feel free to create your own modules to query other database resources, YP maps, and the like. m_finger should be a good example of how to do it.

If you create your own modules or have other changes and feel that they could be helpful for others, don't hesitate to submit them to the author for inclusion in later releases.

Finally, to use lbdbq from mutt, add the following line to your $HOME/.muttrc:

    set query_command="lbdbq '%s'"

-v | --version

Print version number of lbdbq.

-h | --help

Print short help of lbdbq.

/etc/lbdb.rc

$HOME/.lbdbrc

$HOME/.lbdb/lbdbrc

$HOME/.lbdb/rc

/usr/lib/lbdb/*

$HOME/.lbdb/m_inmail.list

$HOME/.lbdb/nodelist

finger(1), ypcat(1), niscat(1), getent(1), pgp(1), pgpk(1), gpg(1), mutt(1), lbdb-fetchaddr(1), nodelist2lbdb(1), mutt_ldap_query(1), abook(1), addr-email(1), addressbook(1), mutt(1), pine(1), emacs(1), xemacs(1), Palm::PDB(3pm), Palm::Address(3pm), Net::LDAP(3pm).

Most of the really interesting code of this program (namely, the RFC 822 address parser used by lbdb-fetchaddr) was stolen from Michael Elkins' mutt mail user agent. Additional credits go to Brandon Long for putting the query functionality into mutt.

Many thanks to the authors of the several modules and extensions: Ross Campbell <rcampbel@us.oracle.com> (m_abook, m_yppasswd), Marc de Courville <marc@courville.org> (m_ldap, mutt_ldap_query), Brendan Cully <brendan@kublai.com> (m_osx_addressbook, m_vcf), Gabor Fleischer <flocsy@mtesz.hu> (m_pine), Rick Frankel <rick@rickster.com> (m_gnomecard), Utz-Uwe Haus <haus@uuhaus.de> (m_bbdb, m_nispasswd), Torsten Jerzembeck <toje@nightingale.ms.sub.org> (m_addr_email), Adrian Likins <alikins@redhat.com> (m_getent), Gergely Nagy <algernon@debian.org> (m_wanderlust), Dave Pearson <davep@davep.org> (m_palm, lbdb.el), and Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke@octa4.net.au> (m_muttalias).

The lbdb package was initially written by Thomas Roessler <roessler@guug.de> and is now maintained and heavily extended by Roland Rosenfeld <roland@spinnaker.de>.