4.17.7 Special Comparisons

In addition to the traditional relational operators, described above, mailfromd provides two operators for regular expression matching:

The type of the regular expression used by matches operator is controlled by #pragma regex (see pragma regex). For example:

$f ⇒ "gray@gnu.org.ua"
$f matches '.*@gnu\.org\.ua' ⇒ true
$f matches '.*@GNU\.ORG\.UA' ⇒ false
#pragma regex +icase
$f matches '.*@GNU\.ORG\.UA' ⇒ true

The fnmatches operator compares its left-hand operand with a globbing pattern (see glob(7)) given as its right-hand side operand. For example:

$f ⇒ "gray@gnu.org.ua"
$f fnmatches "*ua" ⇒ true
$f fnmatches "*org" ⇒ false
$f fnmatches "*org*" ⇒ true

Both operators have a special form, for ‘MX’ pattern matching. The expression:

  x mx matches y

is evaluated as follows: first, the expression x is analyzed and, if it is an email address, its domain part is selected. If it is not, its value is used verbatim. Then the list of ‘MX’s for this domain is looked up. Each of ‘MX’ names is then compared with the regular expression y. If any of the names matches, the expression returns true. Otherwise, its result is false.

Similarly, the expression:

  x mx fnmatches y

returns true only if any of the ‘MX’s for (domain or email) x match the globbing pattern y.

Both mx matches and mx fnmatches can signal the following exceptions: e_temp_failure, e_failure.

The value of any parenthesized subexpression occurring within the right-hand side argument to matches or mx matches can be referenced using the notation ‘\d’, where d is the ordinal number of the subexpression (subexpressions are numbered from left to right, starting at 1). This notation is allowed in the program text as well as within double-quoted strings and here-documents, for example:

if $f matches '.*@\(.*\)\.gnu\.org\.ua'
  set message "Your host name is \1;"
fi

Remember that the grouping symbols are ‘\(’ and ‘\)’ for basic regular expressions, and ‘(’ and ‘)’ for extended regular expressions. Also make sure you properly escape all special characters (backslashes in particular) in double-quoted strings, or use single-quoted strings to avoid having to do so (see singe-vs-double, for a comparison of the two forms).