Ubuntu Manpage: lbdbq - query program for the little brother's database

NAME

       lbdbq - 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). By default this uses $HOME/.lbdb/m_inmail.utf-8 as its database file, but this can
be changed using INMAIL_DB variable (but do not forget to change this in the lbdb-fetchaddr(1)
call using option -f, too).

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_goobook
This module uses the program goobook(1), a tool to access Google contacts via command line.

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.

m_khard
This module searches a CardDAV address book via khard(1).

m_mu This module uses the program mu-cfind(1), which searches in the index file generated by the mu
tool. You can filter the results with the variables MU_AFTER (the number of seconds since
1970-01-01 UTC) and MU_PERSONAL (set to true or yes, remember to invoke mu-index(1) with --my-
address)

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.utf-8
       $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  <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),
       Brian   Salter-Duke   <b_duke@bigpond.net.au>   (m_muttalias),  François  Charlier  <fcharlier@ploup.net>
       (m_goobook), and Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> (m_khard)

AUTHOR

       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>.

Unix                                               March 2018                                           LBDBQ(1)