inbetween

My email has been giving me problems lately. It all started when I was trying out different operating systems that didn't really like each other. Moving the email files back and forth took it's toll on the little bastards, and I wound up with lots of copies of the same exact email sitting in my in box.

Well, then Perl to the rescue.

Note to anybody out there listening. It isn't PERL. It sure as hell isn't P.E.R.L. Perl is the language, perl is the program that compiles and interprets the language. Stop writing PERL.

Twenty lines of perl (could have been ten, but I wanted to make sure that I wouldn't loose anything important) and my inbox shrank from 200 megabytes, down to eight. 23,491 messages down to 1,238. That's a damn fine improvement. I'm quite happy with myself.

For those of you playing along at home, here's the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Digest::MD5 qw(md5_hex);

my ($from, $to) = @_;
my (%uniq, $msg);
my ($head, $body);
my $i = 0;

$|++;

open (my $fh, "<$from") || die;
while(<$fh>) {
	if(m/^From /) {
		next if ($msg eq "");
		$i++;
		print '.' if(($i % 50) == 0);
		print " $i\n" if(($i % 1000) == 0);
		($head, $body) = split /\n\n/, $msg;
		$uniq{md5_hex($body)} = $msg;
		$msg = $_;
	} else {
		$msg .= $_;
	}
}

open (my $th, ">$to") || die;
while(my ($k, $v) = each %uniq) {
	print $th $v;
}