“Loosely put, a “contact manager” is a piece of software that
helps you keep track of information about people you may need to
contact in the future. In the past, people often called the
physical version of these things a “rolodex,” which incidentally
was a brand name for the Cadillac of such contact managers, the
circular Rolodex file that sat atop the desk of every successful
20th century businessman. I hear that many people use devices like
this even today; in this week’s column, I’d like to show how it can
be done on Linux systems with faster search times and much less
desk space.”
“Keeping a free-form address list
This is the simplest way to keep names and addresses in Linux.
You can keep names and addresses in a text file as a free-form
address list; to find an entry, use the search capabilities of
tools like grep, text editors, and text pagers such as
less.”
“What’s nice about such lists is that you don’t have to keep the
same information or format for each entry — one might contain just
a name and phone number, another a complete mailing address,
another a name and e-mail address. With a free-form address list,
each entry contains whatever information you want in the format you
want. Separate the entries with a delimiter line of your
preference, like “###” on a line by itself.”