Edit, combine, distribute address lists?
On Linux (Fedora 27) I have accumulated a mishmash of Address Lists. I have found these cryptic files: [dad@datium ~/.thunderbird/lla13zhr.default] $ ll *mab -rw-rw-r-- 1 dad dad 1375 Mar 8 15:07 abook.mab -rw-rw-r-- 1 dad dad 3589 Mar 8 15:07 history.mab -rw-rw-r-- 1 dad dad 12353 Mar 8 15:07 impab-1.mab -rw-rw-r-- 1 dad dad 7967 Mar 8 15:07 impab.mab
I want to edit (with a sensible editor like vi) and combine these files to have, at most, two - abook.mab and history.mab - and then disseminate the result to all my other machines.
Simple, eh? NOT - because these files have an incomprehensible (to me) structure that precludes concatenation, sorting, deduplication, etc. Why, oh why, are they not simple text files? Nevermind. They aren't.
But how, then, can I manipulate them?
Solution choisie
Most of us would do it in Thunderbird, using drag-and-drop to move Contacts from one address book to another.
If you want your data in an editable format, I think you'll need to export. CSV is an obvious text format option, but it loses any Mailing Lists. I think LDIF is editable but of course you'd have to be careful to maintain whatever structure and grammar it uses. LDIF does, IIRC, retain Mailing Lists.
The downside of using either CSV or LDIF is that having reorganised your data, you'll have to re-import it and that means creating a new address book for each text file you import, so you'll end up doing drag-and-drop anyway to get the data from the imported address books into the working address books.
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Solution choisie
Most of us would do it in Thunderbird, using drag-and-drop to move Contacts from one address book to another.
If you want your data in an editable format, I think you'll need to export. CSV is an obvious text format option, but it loses any Mailing Lists. I think LDIF is editable but of course you'd have to be careful to maintain whatever structure and grammar it uses. LDIF does, IIRC, retain Mailing Lists.
The downside of using either CSV or LDIF is that having reorganised your data, you'll have to re-import it and that means creating a new address book for each text file you import, so you'll end up doing drag-and-drop anyway to get the data from the imported address books into the working address books.
Thank you, Zenos. Drag 'n drop editing, while tedious, wasn't as bad as I expected. I did combine qnd merge four files into two, reviewed and edited them: -rw-rw-r-- 1 dad dad 27610 Mar 9 13:40 abook.mab -rw-rw-r-- 1 dad dad 8800 Mar 9 13:39 history.mab
Then I copied these two files via NFS to another Linux computer and found that the updated address lists there matched the source.
Mission accomplished.