Some time ago, I wrote a little "address-book" program for myself.
Yesterday, while talking to a new user, I realized that more of you might
like to use it. The following is a bit sketchy, but should let you decide
and get you running if you are interested.

	ADDRESS is a program which takes a name or list of names and
produces an address or list of same. For example, suppose you login.com
file contained the following:

$ ADDR*ess :== $ UTL$EXE:address -b Sys$Userdisk:[Albaugh]phone.lis

	Then if you typed:

$ addr albaugh

	you would get:
1)
Mike Albaugh
xxxxxxxxxxx
(xxx) xxx-xxxx

	You could similarly find anybody else on the "Atari Alumni et al"
mailing list. You DON'T need to get the name exactly right, although the
part of the program that attempts to match mis-spelled names doesn't know
about the silent 'g', so "alba" won't match but "albak" will. If you give
it more to work with, you have a better chance to match. "Mike Alba" does
work, for instance. If it can't find a "close enough" match, it will say
so, and also tell you the closest match it found. At present, you need to
re-try with that name, if it is the one you wanted. Some time that I have
some spare time I will try to make it a bit friendlier.
	Anyway, you can also just type:
$ addr
first name
second name
third name


	to get several names at once. or:
$ addr mike
	to get all the "mikes" on the list, or:
$ addr
mike
dave

	to get all the mikes and daves, etc.

	These multiple listings are actually more useful when the output
is sent to a file like so:

$ addr -o mikes.lst mike

	Which will put a list of mikes in the file mikes.lst.

	You can also get the list of names from a file, with:

$ addr -i names.lis

	Which will look in the file "names.lis" (a text file with one name per
line) and show you the corresponding addresses, or more usefully:

$ addr -i names.lis -o addresses.lis

	which you can probably figure out.

	When you get tired of looking up Atari Alumni, you can also change
the "book" you use:

$ addr -b mybook.lis fred smith

	will get the entry for Fred Smith from your own private address book.
This file contains entries in which the first line is the "name", to be
compared against the name you give ADDRESS, and the following lines, up to
the next blank line, contain the address, phone number, etc. Any line that
starts with a period will be ignored (to allow me to use .rno files). If the
first line ends in a hyphen, the second line will also be considered part of
the name. Also, the check for blank lines does NOT ignore spaces and tabs, so
if you really want to have a blank line within an entry, just use a line
starting with a space. Just take a look at the default "bookfile" (the
alumni phone list) to get the idea if you're still confused.

	When you get tired of typing your bookfile name all the time you can
do something like:

$ PADDR*ess :== $ UTL$EXE:address -b kim::[Albaugh.private]pphone.lis

	in addition to the original definition. Note the node-name, so I
can use the same file from any system. The alumni list is present on all
the Vaxim, but my private list is only on KIM. This makes it a little slow
but saves disk space and hassle. Incidentally, my KIM login.com defines
paddr without the kim::, because DecNet is to stupid to know when it is
already on kim and uses the net anyway if I use a node name.

	If you've gotten this far, I should warn you that this software is
category D support (we give you a phone number to call which is disconnected,
say, 555-1000). That is, I'll gladly READ complaints sent to KIM::Albaugh,
but do NOT guarantee timely response.

					Have fun,
					Mike

p.s. This message lives in KIM::Sys$Userdisk:[albaugh.phone]address.doc