Awhile ago, after I showed him how I indexed my mail with mairix, MARK gave me a zsh function to wrap a call to mairix and then invoke mutt.  For some reason, when using the function, I was never able to pass multiple search terms to mairix and have it return results.  It always failed.

It turns out that this was a zshism that I wasn’t aware of, and Mark might not have been as well.  I finally took the time to get to the bottom of this and I found this FAQ which explains how word splitting differs in zsh.  (All OTHER shells do it wrong, of course.)  In any case, my multiple search terms were being passed to mairix as a single command line argument, so, of course nothing matched.  I edit the script to call mairix ${=*} instead of mairix $* and it works now.

MARK might not have run into this because he might have SH_WORD_SPLIT turned on.  I do not.

Anyway, here’s the function:

mairix_mail (){
  if (( ${#argv} == 0 )); then
    # nothing to do
    mairix --help
    return
  fi
  # search
  mairix ${=*}
  # see the results
  # assumes results are in ~/Maildir/search_results
  mutt -f=search_results
}
alias gm='mairix_mail';