Basic Bogofilter maintenance examples?

[David Relson]

On Tue, 24 May 2005 12:18:20 -0600
s. keeling wrote:

> Hi.  I'm using Debian stable/woody and the bogofilter from
> www.backports.org, 0.17.4-0.backports.org.1; and yes, I suppose it is
> ancient.  I'll be happy to upgrade when Sarge goes stable.  :-)
> 
> Anyway, I've been wading through the FAQ, manpage, and archives looking
> for bogofilter/bogotune/bogo* usage examples, and I'm not getting very
> far.  Care to suggest some?  I found a bit in the FAQ
> (http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/faq.shtml#compact-database), and
> that worked nicely (49 Mb --> 34 Mb).  Other possible courses of
> action seem a bit less than simple to me:
> 
>   - How is "bogoutil -m" used?  Is it redirection as in the
>     "compact-database" example (above):
> 
>        bogoutil -a 200400101 -m ~/.bogofilter/wordlist.db > \
>             ~/.bogofilter/wordlist.db.new
> 
>     or does bogoutil work on wordlist.db itself without the re-direct?
> 
>   - Ditto for "-n"?
> 
>   - Should I "-n" _then_ "-m"?
> 
>   - Is that "-a" option (for 1Jan2004) correct?  Is there a better way
>     to specify it?

Hello and welcome to the list !

Bogoutil's maintenance capabilities have a degree of flexibility.  The
basic forms are:


1)  bogoutil -m wordlist.db ...
2)  bogoutil -d wordlist.db ... > wordlist.txt 
3)  bogoutil -l wordlist.db ... < wordlist.txt

#1 is doing in-place maintenance.  
#2 uses the maintenance flags to filter bogoutil's dump output.  
#3 uses the maintenance flags to filter input to bogoutil's load command.

"-a 200400101" is wrong -- too many digits.  You want "-a YYYYMMDD",
i.e. "-a 20040101".  Alternately, if the value is small it's
interpreted as a day count, i.e. "bogoutil -d wordlist.db -a 365" can
be used to discard tokens more than a year old.

I suggest that you experiment to see what _really_ happens.  Start by
copying wordlist.db to a new directory, then have fun experimenting!

Regards,

David