Managing UCSC mailing lists with Blanche and Perl

If you manage mailing lists at UCSC you need to know about blanche. Of course it is kinda hard to find out about blanche, see: http://its.ucsc.edu/services/web/unix/blanche
To really learn about Blanche log into unix.ucsc.edu and type blanche -h

I use blanche for it's -f feature. Which allows you to pass a mailing list and a path to a file containing email addresses (or user names). It uses the passed file as the new members of the list. I like to know who people are, so I use a file that has all of my lists with names and info in it, and then run a perl script that creates individual files of members and calls blanche -f on each of those lists.

Steps of My Mailing list management

  1. Created Dated copy of Master List (for history)
  2. Manage Master List text file - add and subtract members
  3. Upload Master List to unix.ucsc.edu
  4. Run Update Mailing Lists perl script

My Master List File

Here is a portion of my tab delimitated file. The only thing that is used by the system is the list and the email/user name. The rest is to keep track of who is who. 

Start	Role	List			Name			Email/User
2006	student	danm-students	Luke McLastname		mb-REDACTED-ck
2006	student	danm-students	Andres McLastname	a-REDACTED-jas
2004	student	danm-students	Adam McLastname		a-REDACTED-ugim@adobe.com
2005	student	danm-students	Nici McLastname		n-REDACTED-sixx@gmail.com
2007	guest	danm-alumni	Fokko McLastname	f-REDACTED-o
2007	guest	danm-alumni	Satadru McLastname	s-REDACTED-d@gmail.com
2006	student	danm-alumni	2006 Student List	danm-students06
2004	student	danm-alumni	2004 Student List	danm-students04
2005	student	danm-alumni	2005 Student List	danm-students05
2003	staff	danm-alumni	Felicia McLastname	f-REDACTED-ice
2002	staff	danm-alumni	Lyle McLastname		l-REDACTED-e
2007	staff	danm-alumni	Chris McLastname	c-REDACTED-ai
2007	staff	danm-faculty	Chris McLastname	c-REDACTED-ai
2007	facutly	danm-faculty	Gustavo McLastname	g-REDACTED-zquez
2007	facutly	danm-faculty	Patty McLastname	p-REDACTED-llagh
2007	facutly	danm-faculty	Soraya McLastname	s-REDACTED-urray
????	faculty	danm-faculty	Ben McLastname		b-REDACTED-j@gmail.com
????	faculty	danm-faculty	Cathy McLastname	c-REDACTED-oussl
????	faculty	danm-faculty	David McLastname	d-REDACTED-
????	faculty	danm-faculty	Paul McLastname		d-REDACTED-sbark
????	faculty	danm-faculty	David McLastname	d-REDACTED-rane
I like to know what year someone started, their basic roll and their name. As you can see some of the email/user values are UCSC user names, some are email addresses and some are other list names. All of which blanche will be able to use.

Perl Script

The perl script opens the mailing-lists.txt file and creates a temparary file using the list name. Using the document above the script would make these files:

Each of these documents gets the members of the list as per the mailing-lists.txt file. And then the script goes through each of the tmp files and runs "blanche list-name -f" on them.

Here is the source code to my update_mailing_lists.pl script. 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl


print "Erasing the temparary email list (list-name.tmp) files.\n";
#erase current temp email lists (".tmp" files)
@files = <*.tmp>;
foreach $file (@files) {
  unlink($file);
}


#Open the master mailing list file and get a copy of it.
print "Opening the Master Email List file (mailing-lists.txt).\n";
#grab everyone
open(MEMBERS, "mailing-lists.txt");
   @file = <MEMBERS>;
close(MEMBERS);

# we don't need the header line so we shift it off.
$headers = shift(@file);

print "adding users to temparary email list .tmp files...\n";
# this loop creates a temparary file for every list in the input
#   file. These temparary files are called listname.tmp
foreach $line (@file){
   #this is a gready split, so multile tabs are taken at once
   #this means you must have a value for every column
   #  and you can add lots of tabs between columns to make the
   #  document look cleen.
   ($year, $role, $list, $name, $email) = split(/[\t]+/, $line);
   
   # this gets rid of the caraige return from the last line.
   chomp($email);
   
   # you can uncomment this print to see what is being collected
   #print $year . " " . $list . " " . $name . " " . $email . "\n";
   
   # this is way inafficent becuase it has to open and close 
   # files for every entry. That means that each temp email list file 
   # is open multiple times
   open(TMP, ">>$list.tmp");
   print TMP $email."\n";
   close(TMP);
   
   # this gives some feedback that something is going on
   print ".";
}
print "\n\n";


# get a list of all of the files in this folder that end in .tmp
# Then step through every file and run blanche on it - to update
#    it's mailing list
@files = <*.tmp>;
foreach $file (@files) {
  ($list, $ext) = split(/\./, $file);
  print "updating $list email list by running:\n";
  print "  blanche $list -f $file\n";
  `blanche $list -f $file`;
}
print "\nDone adding people to lists.\n";

exit;

Run It

Make sure you understand my code before you use this little guy. The command via ssh is: 

perl update_mailing_list.pl
And your master mailing-list.txt file must be named in that fashion. Also, my match on tabs is greedy, so you can have multiple tabs for each delimitation, and you must have values in every "field".

My email/username is lyle, if you have questions please feel free to ask. -Lyle