To be able to move PEAR packages from php.net's svn server to a git repository, I needed to create a authors file containing the svn username, real name and email address of all committers.
Getting all usernames was quite easy with
committers.txt]]>
but that was only half of the job - real names and email addresses were missing.
Luckily, I have a maildir structure with all of the cvs commits of the last 6 years. Extracting the From: lines is trivial with grep, but unfortunately they are encoded:
]]>
This lines are MIME encoded strings using the encoded-word syntax defined in RFC 2047.
I did not find any tools in my distribution that can decode them on CLI, but a web search for "RFC 2047 shell" did give me a mailing list question from 2005 without an answer, and finally an entry on freshmeat about conv2047 which does exactly what I need - take some standard input and decode it to UTF-8. Awesome!