Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 23:52:51 +0200 From: Julian Howard Stacey <jhs@vector.eikon.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: mailmerge functionality - suggestions welcome Message-ID: <199507252152.XAA16044@vector.eikon.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de>
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Hi Hackers,
Before I reinvent the wheel, I'd welcome suggestions ...
What would be our best tools to achieve the following
I want to send out a load of letters & faxes, & need a `mailmerge' type of
functionality. What I have is something like this:
}{
Acme Inc
Mr Fred Customer
Some street
some place
Tel 1234
Fax 5678
My supplier number 1234abcd
\" Last contacted them 7/95, they only buy cheap,
}{
Foo Bar & Associates
Mrs Jane Dough
Some Avenue
Metropolis
Tel 87643
Fax They have one but I dont know the number
Email: broken@unknown.host.com
10 Long line of ..........
chatty extra text/notes
}{
I need tools to iterate through a (tidied up) version (& maybe even sort
it), splitting each line in a set of transient seperate mini files:
adr1 adr2 adr3 adr4 company fax name1 name2 reference
and calling a ./doit shell, that will invoke my existing BSD makefiles,
that in turn invokes nroff &/or make + sendfax, with stuff like
.so var/name1
and
FAX_TO_NAME ="`cat var/name1`"
I could use an /etc/passwd `:' delimited type format, & parse it with awk,
but that's too unwieldy to maintain with vi,
as each of the blocks above would compact to a single long (too long) line.
I'm quite happy to edit the input format, & write some C,
but before I go reinventing the wheel .... Any suggestions of tools ?
Thanks
Julian S. jhs@freebsd.org
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