Kontaktdb

Store, retrieve, and edit basic contact information in plain text.

Why Does This Exist?

I didn't like the existing options for managing contacts on the command line. Programs like abook and khard are nice, but I wanted something much, much simpler since I didn't need the complexity offered by the other options.

The goals for this program are:

• Contact database entirely in plain text with tab-delimited fields.
• Support for contact names and emails (possibly more later, but not much more).
• Really simple set of commands to interact with the database.

What Works?

So far, you can add a contact to the database, delete a contact from the database, retrieve a contact's information, and change a contact's information (though you must change both the name and email at the same time).

Compatibility

The script should work across all *nix environments. The only non-POSIX feature I use is sed -i which is usually available on most BSDs and Linux distributions.

Installing

kontaktdb is just a POSIX shell script. You can put it anywhere in your $PATH or type make install to have it automatically copied to /usr/local/bin/.

Configuring

Set the KONTAKT_DB environment variable to specify the location of the contact database file.

If this variable is unset, kontaktdb will check if XDG_DATA_HOME is defined and will put the database file there.

If neither of the above environment variables are defined, kontaktdb will fall back to storing the database at $HOME/.kontaktdb.

Using

See the output of kontaktdb -h.

Contributing

Send patches and questions to ~jbauer/kontaktdb@lists.sr.ht

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