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MATCH and Replaceable Parameters in procmail

From Nick Moffitt on Sat, 01 May 1999

So, here's one for the answer guy.

I have a mhonarc user that creates drop points for a mhonarc script to walk by every night and process. Thing is, I don't want to have to edit the mhonarc user's .procmailrc every single time. That is, let's say that I have the following:

:0:
* ^Sender: owner-potato-peelers
spool/potato-peelers

:0:
* ^Sender: owner-onion-skinners
spool/onion-skinners

Is there some way that I can automate this format? e.g.:

:0:
* ^Sender: owner-\([^@]+\)
spool/$1

This likely breaks procmail's own regex syntax, but you get the point. "Anything that has an owner-foo Sender header should go to spool/foo."

Nick,

You have the right idea but, as you've guessed, the wrong syntax. The answer is to use the MATCH variable and the \/ (fencepost) operator as described in this excerpt from the procmailrc(5) man page:

       MATCH       This variable is assigned to by procmail when-
                   ever  it is told to extract text from a match-
                   ing regular expression.  It will  contain  all
                   text  matching the regular expression past the
                   `\/' token.

So, your recipe would look something like:

:0:
* ^Sender: owner-\/.*
spool/$MATCH

(though I haven't tested this specifically).

procmail and saved variables.

From Nick Moffitt on Sun, 2 May 1999

I have! It works like a charm.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 42 June 1999

HTML transformation by Heather Stern of Starshine Techinical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

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