>>>>> "Bill" == Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us> writes:
>>>>> "Dan" == Dan McMahill <mcmahill@mtl.mit.edu> writes:

    Dan> anyone have a recommendation for a database program for
    Dan> storing addresses and telephone numbers? I'm interested in
    Dan> storing a few hundred entries and then being able to look up
    Dan> by various methods (name, company, keywords, et cetera.)

    Bill> If you use emacs, try the "Big Brother Database", bbdb (I
    Bill> should put a recent version of it into pkgsrc); among other
    Bill> things, it insinuates itself into your mail reader and
    Bill> tracks email addresss.

I second the recommendation for the bbdb (although it does have some
odd quirks). It's one of the reasons to use Emacs to read your e-mail.

However, if I had a phonebook with a few hundred entries (<¼ megabyte)
I would seriously consider not using *any* database program. Unix's
grep tool is powerful enough that you could create a text file like
this:

    NAME: Jane Goodall
    COMPANY: Primate Research Ctr
    ADDR1: 2002 Bonobo Lane
    ADDR2: Seattle, WA 98105
    PHONE: (206) GOR-ILLA
    KEY: Good haircut. Likes blue umbrellas.

    NAME: Bob Jamieson
    COMPANY: Badass Motorcycling Unixheads, Inc
    ADDR1: 0777 E. Marginalia Blvd
    ADDR2: Seattle, WA 98116
    PHONE: (206) 867-5309
    KEY: No sushi on Mondays.

And then read it like this:

    % grep -p Jane filename
    Usage: grep [-E|-F][-c|-l|-q][-xhbnsviyC] -e pattern_list [-f pattern_file] [file ...]

Oops. Never mind me. NetBSD doesn't support the -p (paragraph) option
that Digital hacked up. I guess you'd have to pull out some other
gizmos from the Unix toolbox:

    % sed 's/^$/^M/' < filename | awk 'BEGIN {RS="\r"}; /Bonobo/ {print}'
    NAME: Jane Goodall
    COMPANY: Primate Research Ctr
    ADDR1: 2002 Bonobo Lane
    ADDR2: Seattle, WA 98105
    PHONE: (206) GOR-ILLA
    KEY: Good haircut. Likes blue umbrellas.

(That's a control-M up there). A little bit harder to type, but you
can always make a one-line shell script or alias out of it. Also, it
shouldn't be hard to read such a file in to a real database should the
need arise.

--Ben