man lbdbq (1): query program for the little brother's database

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

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). reverse_comment realizes the same as comment, but in reverse order, so the most recent timestamp of m_inmail may be on top. If you set SORT_OUTPUT 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.

MODULES

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 or $HOME/.lbdb/ldap.rc or $HOME/.mutt_ldap_query.rc. You can explicitly 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"

OPTIONS

-v | --version: Print version number of lbdbq.
-h | --help: Print short help of lbdbq.

FILES

/etc/lbdb.rc
$HOME/.lbdbrc
$HOME/.lbdb/lbdbrc
$HOME/.lbdb/rc
/usr/lib/lbdb/*
$HOME/.lbdb/m_inmail.list
$HOME/.lbdb/nodelist

CREDITS

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 <[email protected]> (m_abook, m_yppasswd), Marc de Courville <[email protected]> (m_ldap, mutt_ldap_query), Brendan Cully <[email protected]> (m_osx_addressbook, m_vcf), Gabor Fleischer <[email protected]> (m_pine), Rick Frankel <[email protected]> (m_gnomecard), Utz-Uwe Haus <[email protected]> (m_bbdb, m_nispasswd), Torsten Jerzembeck <[email protected]> (m_addr_email), Adrian Likins <[email protected]> (m_getent), Gergely Nagy <[email protected]> (m_wanderlust), Dave Pearson <[email protected]> (m_palm, lbdb.el), and Brian Salter-Duke <[email protected]> (m_muttalias).

AUTHOR

The lbdb package was initially written by Thomas Roessler <[email protected]> and is now maintained and heavily extended by Roland Rosenfeld <[email protected]>.