findcontact

Find contacts (vcards) from a given .vcf file

Hosted at https://git.faster-it.com/findcontact
Mirrored at https://github.com/fasterit/findcontact

About

findcontact is a small perl script that enables searching with a set of regexes to find contacts within a (large) .vcf file.

Obtaining a contacts.vcf depends on which CardDAV server / client you run.
With radicale 1.x you could just copy the file off the server into the directory where your findcontact resides. Or copy / link findcontact into the correct radicale collections subdirectory.

Unfortunately radicale version 2 (and later) switched to a file-per-contact storage system that needs some magic to produce a single .vcf file again, e.g. using GNU sed to make sure each VCARD ends with a \n:

$ sed -e '$G' /var/lib/radicale/collections/collection-root/user/contacts.vcf/* > ~/contacts.vcf

Every .vcf client decides on a specific set of attributes to support and the Inverse Sogo Connector everybody uses for getting the Thunderbird address book synced can't search over all fields. So if you want to search for a phone number you're out of luck. Unless you run findcontact :).

It has been written to only depend on perl modules that ship with a default installation and does not depend on Text::vCard::Addressbook or the like.

License

The script is licensed under the MIT license.

Installation

Clone this repository and copy or symlink findcontact to the directory where your contacts.vcf file resides. The name is hard-coded as that is what we use inside Faster IT GmbH and it's customary for collections of vcards. Obviously if your organizations does differently, change the $contacts_file line.

This script requires perl and runs under Linux, MacOSX and Windows/cygwin. It assumes Linux line endings in the contacts.vcf file (\n only). We never saw anything different but if you run MacOSX server ... you may have to adopt the script a bit.

Usage

findcontact takes an arbitrary number of arguments which are all regexes. All of the arguments given must match to have a vcard shown. All matches are case-insensitive.

Thus you can easily iterate:

$ findcontact pizza
$ findcontact pizza "m(ü|ue)nchen"
$ findcontact pizza "m(ü|ue)nchen" schwabing

All fields are searched, so you can also search for phone numbers or parts of the comment field:

$ findcontact "89.*4209"

If you want to limit the fields printed, use grep:

$ findcontact pizza | grep "^\(FN\|TEL\|$\|Found \)"

Inside findcontact you'll find that the VERSION, PRODID, PHOTO, UID and X-RADICALE-NAME fields are removed from the output. If you need any of them or want to always remove further fields from output ... change the appropriate lines.

Support

Commercial support is available from Faster IT GmbH.