I'm trying to write a procmail recipe that sends email from a range of
IP addresses to a certain email box. For example:

:0 :
* ^Received.*123\.123\.123\.123
somemailbox

puts the any email who's received line contains 123.123.123.123 into
the email box somemailbox.

What if I wanted to put all email from IP number ranging from
123.123.123.123 to 223.223.223.223 into the same box. At first I
thought this was the solution:
* ^Received.*[123-223]\.[123-223]\.[123-223]\.[123-223]
but it is not.

Hi fmcneely,

I think the characters inside [ ] brackets can only be single numbers
to single numbers. For example, [0-9] would work but [10-11] would
not.

It works the same way with alphabetic characters. For example, to
specify A through D you'd say [A-D].  But if you wanted something like
AAA to AAB, you couldn't say [AAA-AAB].

What you are asking for requires breaking up the recipe. It will
expand to a multi-line rule.

:0:
* ^Received.*12[3-9]\.12[3-9]\.12[3-9]\.12[3-9]
* ^Received.*1[3-9][0-9]\.1[0-9][0-9]\.1[0-9][0-9]\.1[0-9][0-9]
* ^Received.*2[0-1][0-9]\.2[0-1][0-9]\.2[0-1][0-9]\.2[0-1][0-9]
* ^Received.*2[1-2][0-3]\.2[0-2][0-3]\.2[0-2][0-3]\.2[0-2][0-3]
somemailbox

I hope this works - just ask for Answer Clarification if it doesn't!

I did that from my head, BUT, you can still check this sites for some
additional hints:

Some site hosting many UNIX man pages
http://www.sunspot.noao.edu/cgi-bin-local/man-cgi?regexp+5


Google search terms:
man regexp [ ]
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=man+regexp+%5B+%5D


Sincerely,
CJS

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Request for Answer Clarification by fmcneely-ga on 16 Jun 2002 11:06 PDT

Thanks for the response. I was afraid that this would end up being the
answer. I have to do a few dozen of these. Perhaps a solution for my
situation is to write an external program and pass it the parameters
of these IPs and have it return a pass/fail result.

I'm very pleased with your answer for it's correctness but still hope
that someone can come up with a better solution. Otherwise, I'd be
happy to award your answer the cash.

---

Clarification of Answer by cjs2u-ga on 16 Jun 2002 20:10 PDT

fmcneely,
A few dozen could really take some time! I'm more of a general unix
fan than a skillful programmer so I wouldn't know exactly how to begin
such a program. Hopefully someone can add comments which show how to
shorten the rule list.
Sincerely,
CJS

This answer has helped me understand very clearly.