total perl n00b needs help for thunderbird -> vcard script

[23meg]

first off, i'm not entirely sure if i'm not abusing the programming section with a drive-by practical help request; forgive my lameness if this is the case, but this seemed too perl-related to be in the "other applications" section..

what i want to do is transfer my thunderbird contacts to my ipod mini. the mini accepts contacts in vcard format, and i know that thunderbird doesn't have built in support for exporting vcard files from its adress book. some folks are developing an extension (http://vcard.mozdev.org/) that will allow this, but it's in the works yet. however, i've found this perl script (http://hacks.traveljury.com/) that claims to do exactly what i want. trouble is, i'm a total alien to perl, and don't know how to make use of the script. i've made it executable by applying chmod +x to it, but that's how far i've got. ,

the part i'm stuck with is how to get the actual output from the script. it says in the comments that


vCards are printed to STDOUT, so can be redirected in the usual way:

$progname > vcards_file_name
$progname | recode UTF8..ISO-8859-15 > vcards_file_name

now, what i want to learn is how to actually redirect STDOUT to a vcard file. any help is appreciated.

[LordHunter317]

Do just what the script says.

Run it on the command line, and give it '>' and the filename ytou want to save the vcard as as the last two parts of the line.

So if it's called 'vcard.pl', you'd do:
vcard.pl [arguments] > myvcard.vcardand you'd have the output in myvcard.vcard.

[23meg]

i've tried that, but i get a "mab2vcard.pl: command not found" error on the console, and an empty vcard file (0 bytes).

[LordHunter317]

i've tried that, but i get a "mab2vcard.pl: command not found" error on the console, and an empty vcard file (0 bytes).It's not in your PATH then. The eaisest way is to cd to the directory the script is in and prepend ./ to it's name.

[23meg]

i've checked that too; i'm sure it's in my path.

here's how i've got it working (trial and error..):


perl mab2vcard [path including filename] > [vcard filename]

no matter what i've tried, i couldn't get the script to recognize the path i entered in the line


use constant ABOOK_PATHS => qw ( path );

tried entering the exact path of the adress book file, including and excluding filename, no luck. so i specified it as a command line paramater, and voila, it works.

for reference: the script doesn't do its job very well though; deleted contacts are still transferred to the vcard file (this is listed as a bug), and any non-western charactes are messed up once on the ipod, even though the script seems to be using utf8. i could still use a hand with the latter issue.

thanks for your attention..