MU EXTRACT(1) General Commands Manual MU EXTRACT(1)
NAME
mu-extract - display and save message parts (attachments), and open
them with other tools.
SYNOPSIS
mu [COMMON-OPTIONS] extract [OPTIONS] [FILE]
mu [COMMON-OPTIONS] extract [OPTIONS] FILE PATTERN
DESCRIPTION
mu extract is the mu sub-command for extracting MIME-parts (e.g.,
attachments) from mail messages. The sub-command works on message
files, and does not require the message to be indexed in the database.
For attachments, the file name used when saving it is the name of the
attachment in the message. If there is no such name, or when saving
non-attachment MIME-parts, a name is derived from the message-id of the
message.
If you specify a regular express pattern as the second argument, all
attachments with filenames matching that pattern will be extracted. The
regular expressions are basic PCRE, and are case-sensitive by default;
see pcre(3) for more details.
Without any options, mu extract simply outputs the list of leaf MIME-
parts in the message. Only `leaf' MIME-parts (including RFC822
attachments) are considered, multipart/* etc. are ignored.
Without a filename parameter, mu extract reads a message from standard-
input. In that case, you cannot use the second, PATTERN parameter as
this would be ambiguous; instead, use the --matches option.
EXTRACT OPTIONS
-a, --save-attachments
Save all MIME-parts that look like attachments.
--save-all
Save all non-multipart MIME-parts.
--parts parts
Only consider the following numbered parts (comma-separated list). The
numbers for the parts can be seen from running mu extract without any
options but only the message file.
--target-dir dir
Save the parts in dir rather than the current working directory.
--overwrite
Overwrite existing files with the same name; by default overwriting is
not allowed.
-u,--uncooked
By default, mu transforms the attachment filenames a bit (such as by
replacing spaces by dashes); with this option, leave that to the
minimum for creating a legal filename in the target directory.
--matches pattern
Attachments with filenames matching pattern will be extracted. The
regular expressions are basic PCRE, and are case-sensitive by default;
see pcre(3) for more details.
--play
Try to `play' (open) the attachment with the default application for
the particular file type. On MacOS, this uses the open program, on
other platforms it uses xdg-open. You can choose a different program by
setting the MU_PLAY_PROGRAM environment variable.
COMMON OPTIONS
-d, --debug
Makes mu generate extra debug information, useful for debugging the
program itself. Debug information goes to the standard logging
location; see mu(1).
-q, --quiet
Causes mu not to output informational messages and progress information
to standard output, but only to the log file. Error messages will still
be sent to standard error. Note that mu index is much faster with
--quiet, so it is recommended you use this option when using mu from
scripts etc.
--log-stderr
Causes mu to not output log messages to standard error, in addition to
sending them to the standard logging location.
--nocolor
Do not use ANSI colors. The environment variable NO_COLOR can be used
as an alternative to --nocolor.
-V, --version
Prints mu version and copyright information.
-h, --help
Lists the various command line options.
EXAMPLES
To display information about all the MIME-parts in a message file:
$ mu extract msgfile
To extract MIME-part 3 and 4 from this message, overwriting existing
files with the same name:
$ mu extract --parts=3,4 --overwrite msgfile
To extract all files ending in `.jpg' (case-insensitive):
$ mu extract msgfile '.*\.jpg'
To extract an mp3-file, and play it in the default mp3-playing
application:
$ mu extract --play msgfile 'whoopsididitagain.mp3'
when reading from standard-input, you need --matches, so:
$ cat msgfile | mu extract --play --matches 'whoopsididitagain.mp3'
