Re: Original source file name?

[Earl Hood <ehood@hydra.acs.uci.edu>]

On May 31, 2001 at 10:06, J C Lawrence wrote:

> > Since you mentioned that you have a MH-style mailstore, how
> > difficult would it be to have the filename of each message be the
> > actual message-id?  Therefore, you can access the original mail
> > message just by a simple file open operation using the message-id
> > as the filename (with whatever pathname prefix).
> 
> Hurm.  Yeah, It would be trivial to write a little tool to just
> symlink each message against its MessageID.  (I can't do renames s
> the mailstore is regularly processed by real MH tools) <testing>
> Yup, that'll work.  Thanks.

To save inodes, you could use a BerkeleyDB, ndbm, or similiar type
of data store to map message-ids to filenames.  There are modules
in Perl for interfacing with these type of files with a hash interface.
Other popular scripting languanges probably provide the same.  The key
is to use a database format that does not have key and value length
limitations that could cause you problems.

--ewh