[wellylug] Procmail recipes on days of the week

[Chris Hodgetts]

Found it :)


Q: How do I do different actions depending on the time of day, day of 
week, etc?

A: The "brute force" answer is to run date(1) each time you receive a 
message, and compare the results against some regular expression, but a 
simple and efficient shortcut is to use the date stamp which is already 
in the From_ line -- it will be in your (machine's) local time zone and 
reasonably close to (usually within seconds or even split-seconds of) 
the message's arrival.

Here's an example which forwards messages elsewhere, but only on 
weekdays between 9 and 5. (Actually, until 16:59:59.)

	:0
	* ^From [^ 	]+[ 	]+(Mon|Tue|Wed|Thu|Fri) ... ... .. \
		([ 0]9|1[1-6]):[0-5][0-9]:[0-5][0-9]
	! frankz at golden.net

If you want to save to a folder with today's date, you can similarly 
extract the time out of this time stamp and use that as part of the 
folder name:

	:0                     # Wed   Aug 14 15:59:59     +0300 1994
	* ^From [^ 	]+[ 	]+... \/... .. ..:..:.. [+-]?.... ....
	{
	    FROM_=$MATCH

	    :0
	    * FROM_ ?? ^^\/[a-z][a-z][a-z]
	    { MONTH=$MATCH }

	    # Exercise: Make sure month name is always properly capitalized,
	    #  and/or convert it to a month number

	    :0
	    * FROM_ ?? ^^... \/([ 0][0-9]|1[0-2])
	    { DAY=$MATCH }

	    :0   # Y10K problem! :-)
	    * FROM_ ?? ()\/[1-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]$$
	    { YEAR=$MATCH }

	    # Should probably bail out here if any of MONTH DAY YEAR unset

	    :0:  # save to daily-yyyy-mmm-dd
	    daily-$YEAR-$MONTH-$DAY
	}

The mailing list archives have numerous variations on this theme.

Chris Hodgetts wrote:
> I am looking at getting procmail to execute a script for when mail comes 
> in but it only needs to execute to the script on Tuesday and Thursday.
> (but not on the mail header date, on the system date)
> 
> Can procmail do this?
> 
> Could anyone give me ideas on what I would need to do?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Cheers
> 
>