Extracting ALL of the attachments from a mailing list

[Jeremy Turner]

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 17:44 -0500, Gerald Combs wrote:
> Before I start rolling my own solution, does anyone know of a utility or
> collection of utilities that will
> 
>   1) Extract all of the MIME attachments from a mailing list archive,

You might check out uudeview or mpack
http://www.fpx.de/fp/Software/UUDeview/
No URL for mpack.  In the Debian package, the author says of mpack says
to use uudeview.

>   2) Extract the files from any archived (tar|zip|rar|...) attachments,

I assume once you extract the files from your mail archives and remove
any duplicates, it would be trival to run a loop on all files you
extracted:

<pseudo-code>
if $extension eq ".tar.gz" or $extension eq ".tgz"
then
	tar xvfz $filename
else if $extension eq ".tar.bz2" or $extension eq ".tbz2"
then
	tar xvfj $filename
else if $extension eq ".zip"
then
	unzip $filename
end if
</pseudo-code>

>   3) Move each extracted file to a specific directory, renaming it if
>      there's a naming collision, and

uudeview does this.

>   4) Remove any duplicate files.

Maybe an MD5sum hash table to check for duplicates?

Jeremy