MAIRIXRC(5)							File Formats Manual						       MAIRIXRC(5)

NAME

       mairixrc - configuration file for mairix(1)

SYNOPSIS

       $HOME/.mairixrc

DESCRIPTION

       The mairixrc file tells mairix where your mail folders are located.  It also tells mairix where the results of searches are to be written.

       mairix searches for this file at $HOME/.mairixrc unless the -f option is used.

       The  directives base, mfolder, and database must always appear in the file.  There must also be some folder definitions (using the maildir,
       mh, or mbox) directives.

   Comments
       Any line starting with a '#' character is treated as a comment.

   Directives
       base=base-directory
	      This defines the path to the common parent directory of all your maildir folders.

	      If the path is relative, it is treated as relative to the location of the mairixrc file.

       maildir=list-of-folder-specifications
	      This is a colon-separated list of the Maildir folders (relative to `base') that you want indexed.  Any  entry  that  ends  `...'	is
	      recursively scanned to find any Maildir folders underneath it.

	      More  than  one line starting with `maildir' can be included.  In this case, mairix joins the lines together with colons as though a
	      single list of folders had been given on a single very long line.

	      Each colon-separated entry may be a wildcard.  See the discussion under mbox (below) for the wildcard syntax.  For example

		   maildir=zzz/foo*...

	      will match maildir folders like these (relative to the base-directory)

		   zzz/foobar/xyz
		   zzz/fooquux
		   zzz/foo
		   zzz/fooabc/u/v/w

	      and

		   maildir=zzz/foo[abc]*

	      will match maildir folders like these (relative to the folder_base)

		   zzz/fooa
		   zzz/fooaaaxyz
		   zzz/foobcd
		   zzz/fooccccccc

	      If a folder name contains a colon, you can write this by using the sequence ':' to escape  the  colon.	Otherwise,  the  backslash
	      character is treated normally.  (If the folder name actually contains the sequence ':', you're out of luck.)

       mh=list-of-folder-specifications
	      This  is	a  colon-separated list of the MH folders (relative to `base') that you want indexed.  Any entry that ends '...' is recur-
	      sively scanned to find any MH folders underneath it.

	      More than one line starting with 'mh' can be included.  In this case, mairix joins the lines together with colons as though a single
	      list of folders had been given on a single very long line.

	      Each colon-separated entry may be a wildcard, see the discussion under maildir (above) and mbox (below) for the syntax and semantics
	      of specifying wildcards.

	      recognizes the types of MH folders created by the following email applications:

	      *      xmh

	      *      sylpheed

	      *      claws-mail

	      *      evolution

	      *      NNML

	      *      Mew

       mbox=list-of-folder-specifications
	      This is a colon-separated list of the mbox folders (relative to `base') that you want indexed.

	      Each colon-separated item in the list can be suffixed by '...'.  If the item matches a regular file, that file is treated as a  mbox
	      folder  and  the	'...' suffix is ignored.  If the item matches a directory, a recursive scan of everything inside that directory is
	      made, and all regular files are initially considered as mbox folders.  (Any directories found in this scan are  themselves  scanned,
	      since the scan is recursive.)

	      Each  colon-separated  item  may contain wildcard operators, but only in its final path component.  The wildcard operators currently
	      supported are

       *
	      Match zero or more characters (each character matched is arbitrary)

       ?
	      Match exactly one arbitrary character

       [abcs-z]
	      Character class : match a single character from the set a, b, c, s, t, u, v, w, x, y and z.

	      To include a literal ']' in the class, place it immediately after the opening '['.  To include a literal '-' in the class, place	it
	      immediately before the closing ']'.

	      If these metacharacters are included in non-final path components, they have no special meaning.

	      Here are some examples

       mbox=foo/bar*
	      matches 'foo/bar', 'foo/bar1', 'foo/barrrr' etc

       mbox=foo*/bar*
	      matches 'foo*/bar', 'foo*/bar1', 'foo*/barrrr' etc

       mbox=foo/*
	      matches 'foo/bar', 'foo/bar1', 'foo/barrrr', 'foo/foo', 'foo/x' etc

       mbox=foo...
	      matches any regular file in the tree rooted at 'foo'

       mbox=foo/*...
	      same as before

       mbox=foo/[a-z]*...
	      matches 'foo/a', 'foo/aardvark/xxx', 'foo/zzz/foobar', 'foo/w/x/y/zzz', but not 'foo/A/foobar'

	      Regular  files that are mbox folder candidates are examined internally.  Only files containing standard mbox 'From ' separator lines
	      will be scanned for messages.

	      If a regular file has a name ending in '.gz', and gzip support is compiled into the mairix binary, the file will	be  treated  as  a
	      gzipped mbox.

	      If  a  regular  file has a name ending in '.bz2', and bzip support is compiled into the mairix binary, the file will be treated as a
	      bzip2'd mbox.

	      More than one line starting with 'mbox' can be included.	In this case, mairix joins the lines together with colons as though a sin-
	      gle list of folders had been given on a single very long line.

	      mairix  performs no locking of mbox folders when it is accessing them.  If a mail delivery program is modifying the mbox at the same
	      time, it is likely that one or messages in the mbox will never get indexed by mairix (until the database is  removed  and  recreated
	      from  scratch,  anyway.)	 The assumption is that mairix will be used to index archive folders rather than incoming ones, so this is
	      unlikely to be much of a problem in reality.

	      mairix can support a maximum of 65536 separate mboxes, and a maximum of 65536 messages within any one mbox.

       omit=list-of-glob-patterns
	      This is a colon-separated list of glob patterns for folders to be omitted from the indexing.  This allows wide wildcards and  recur-
	      sive  elements  to  be  used in the maildir,mh, andmbox directives, with the omit option used to selectively remove unwanted folders
	      from the folder lists.

	      Within the glob patterns, a single '*' matches any sequence of characters other than '/'.  However  '**'	matches  any  sequence	of
	      characters  including  '/'.   This allows glob patterns to be constructed which have a wildcard for just one directory component, or
	      for any number of directory components.

	      The _omit_ option can be specified as many times as required so that the list of patterns doesn't all have to fit on one line.

	      As an example,

		   mbox=bulk...
		   omit=bulk/spam*

	      will index all mbox folders at any level under the 'bulk' subdirectory of the base folder, except  for  those  folders  whose  names
	      start 'bulk/spam', e.g. 'bulk/spam', 'bulk/spam2005' etc.

	      In constrast,

		   mbox=bulk...
		   omit=bulk/spam**

	      will  index  all	mbox  folders  at any level under the 'bulk' subdirectory of the base folder, except for those folders whose names
	      start 'bulk/spam', e.g. 'bulk/spam', 'bulk/spam2005', 'bulk/spam/2005', 'bulk/spam/2005/jan' etc.

       nochecks
	      This takes no arguments.	If a line starting with nochecks is present, it is the equivalent of  specifying  the  -Q  flag  to  every
	      indexing run.

       mfolder=match-folder-name
	      This  defines the name of the folder (within the directory specified by base) into which the search mode writes its output.  (If the
	      mformat used is 'raw' or 'excerpt', then this setting is not used and may be omitted.)

	      The mfolder setting may be over-ridden for a particular search by using the -o option to mairix.

	      mairix will refuse to output search results to a folder that appears to be amongst those that are indexed.  This is to prevent acci-
	      dental deletion of emails.

	      If  the  first character of the mfolder value is '/' or '.', it is taken as a pathname in its own right.	This allows you to specify
	      absolute paths and paths relative to the current directory where the mfolder should be written.  Otherwise, the value of mfolder	is
	      appended to the value of base, in the same way as for the source folders.

       mformat=format
	      This  defines  the  type of folder used for the match folder where the search results go.  There are four valid settings for format,
	      namely 'maildir', 'mh', 'mbox', 'raw' or 'excerpt'.  If the 'raw' setting is used then mairix will just print out the path names	of
	      the  files  that	match  and no match folder will be created.  If the 'excerpt' setting is used, mairix will also print out the To:,
	      Cc:, From:, Subject: and Date: headers of the matching messages.	'maildir' is the default if this option is not defined.  The  set-
	      ting is case-insensitive.

       database=path-to-database
	      This defines the path where mairix's index database is kept.  You can keep this file anywhere you like.

	      Currently,  mairix  will	place  a single database file at the location indicated by path-to-database.  However, a future version of
	      mairix may instead place a directory containing several files at this location.

	      path-to-database should be an absolute pathname (starting with '/').  If a relative pathname is used, it will be	interpreted  rela-
	      tive to the current directory at the time mairix is run, (not relative to the location of the mairixrc file or anything like that.)

   Expansions
       The part of each line in '.mairixrc' following the equals sign can contain the following types of expansion:

       Home directory expansion
	      If the sequence '~/' appears at the start of the text after the equals sign, it is expanded to the user's home directory.  Example:

		   database=~/Mail/mairix_database

       Environment expansion
	      If  a '$' is followed by a sequence of alpha-numeric characters (or '_'), the whole string is replaced by looking up the correspond-
	      ing environment variable.  Similarly, if '$' is followed by an open brace ('{'), everything up to the next close brace is looked	up
	      as an environment variable and the result replaces the entire sequence.

	      Suppose in the shell we do

		   export FOO=bar

	      and the '.mairixrc' file contains

		   maildir=xxx/$FOO
		   mbox=yyy/a${FOO}b

	      this is equivalent to

		   maildir=xxx/bar
		   mbox=yyy/abarb

	      If the specified environment variable is not set, the replacement is the empty string.

NOTES

       An alternative path to the configuration file may be given with the -f option to mairix(1).

								   January 2006 						       MAIRIXRC(5)