A couple years ago, I hit my storage limit on Google. I had a massive archive of e-mail and wasn’t using most of it. As a pack rat, I decided that I should archive all the e-mail, put it in backup, and then delete it all from my Google account.
/archive/Google/gmail-2023-06-14.mbox
When would I ever use this back-up? It turns out that today is the first day I’ve ever had to use it. I was reminded of the poem Hokusai Says by Roger Keyes. I know that I have a slick Esperanto translation of it somewhere in my e-mail.
First, I looked for a suggestive line:
pv gmail-2023-06-14.mbox | grep -i "vivanta en vi"
This turned up a few hits and likely match hokusai.pdf.
The pv command displays a progress meter.
Asking for line numbers gave:
$ pv gmail-2023-06-14.mbox | grep -in "hokusai.pdf"
119160961:Content-Type: application/pdf; name="hokusai.pdf"
119160962:Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="hokusai.pdf"
119557067:Subject: Re: NASK: Hokusai Diras
Okay! There is definitely a relevant e-mail here: Re: NASK: Hokusai Diras.
I remembered that I first heard the poem at NASK.
At this point, I fired up mutt and asked it to examine the mailbox.
$ mutt -f /archive/Google/gmail-2023-06-14.mbox
It quickly loaded the mailbox, and I could track down the relevant file.
In retrospect, I could have just booted up mutt and searched there.
Oh, well, a couple small Unix lessons learned here.
Published: Apr 16, 2025 @ 14:22.
Last Modified: Apr 18, 2025 @ 16:19.
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