NOTMUCH-DUMP(1) notmuch NOTMUCH-DUMP(1)NAMEnotmuch-dump - creates a plain-text dump of the tags of each message
SYNOPSIS
notmuch dump [--gzip] [--format=(batch-tag|sup)] [--output=<file>] [--]
[<search-term> ...]
DESCRIPTION
Dump tags for messages matching the given search terms.
Output is to the given filename, if any, or to stdout.
These tags are the only data in the notmuch database that can't be
recreated from the messages themselves. The output of notmuch dump is
therefore the only critical thing to backup (and much more friendly to
incremental backup than the native database files.)
See notmuch-search-terms(7) for details of the supported syntax for
<search-terms>. With no search terms, a dump of all messages in the
database will be generated. A "--" argument instructs notmuch that the
remaining arguments are search terms.
Supported options for dump include
--gzip Compress the output in a format compatible with gzip(1).
--format=(sup|batch-tag)
Notmuch restore supports two plain text dump formats, both
with one message-id per line, followed by a list of tags.
batch-tag
The default batch-tag dump format is intended to more
robust against malformed message-ids and tags containing
whitespace or non-ascii(7) characters. Each line has the
form
+<encoded-tag> +<encoded-tag> ... -- id:<quoted-mes‐
sage-id>
Tags are hex-encoded by replacing every byte not matching
the regex [A-Za-z0-9@=.,_+-] with %nn where nn is the two
digit hex encoding. The message ID is a valid Xapian
query, quoted using Xapian boolean term quoting rules: if
the ID contains whitespace or a close paren or starts
with a double quote, it must be enclosed in double quotes
and double quotes inside the ID must be doubled. The
astute reader will notice this is a special case of the
batch input format for notmuch-tag(1); note that the sin‐
gle message-id query is mandatory for notmuch-restore(1).
sup
The sup dump file format is specifically chosen to be
compatible with the format of files produced by sup-dump.
So if you've previously been using sup for mail, then the
notmuch restore command provides you a way to import all
of your tags (or labels as sup calls them). Each line has
the following form
<message-id> ( <tag> ... )
with zero or more tags are separated by spaces. Note that
(malformed) message-ids may contain arbitrary non-null
characters. Note also that tags with spaces will not be
correctly restored with this format.
--output=<filename>
Write output to given file instead of stdout.
SEE ALSOnotmuch(1), notmuch-config(1), notmuch-count(1), notmuch-hooks(5), not‐
much-insert(1), notmuch-new(1), notmuch-reply(1), notmuch-restore(1),
notmuch-search(1), notmuch-search-terms(7), notmuch-show(1), not‐
much-tag(1)AUTHOR
Carl Worth and many others
COPYRIGHT
2014, Carl Worth and many others
0.20.2 February 18, 2016 NOTMUCH-DUMP(1)
