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+# 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](http://radicale.org/) you can 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 every .vcf client decides on a specific set of attributes to support and the [Inverse Sogo Connector](https://sogo.nu/download.html#/frontends) 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](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).
+
+## 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 all all regexes. All of the arguments to give 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 form 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.