dovecot - Jun 2013 - Administrative mailbox deletions

I'm in the process of nuking a bunch of dead mailboxes after they've 
been migrated to other servers - but the accounts have been kept.

A simple shell script takes care of most of it, BUT.... (there's always 
a "but" isn't there?)

One user has named all his mailboxes with leading hyphens.

ie:

-foo
-bar
-bazz

and "doveadm mailbox delete" doesn't like it.

Does anyone have the magic sauce needed to escape the - character?

Thanks in advance
Alan

On Tue, Jun 04, 2013 at 11:58:50AM +0100, Alan Brown
wrote:
> 
> 
> One user has named all his mailboxes with leading hyphens.
> 
> ie:
> 
> -foo
> -bar
> -bazz
> Does anyone have the magic sauce needed to escape the - character?
No idea what you've tried, but maybe '--' is enough?

	doveadm mailbox delete -u $user -- -foo


  -jf

>> and "doveadm mailbox delete" doesn't like it.
>>
>> Does anyone have the magic sauce needed to escape the - character?
>
> An "escaping" that works at the *nix level (not necessarily with
> doveadm, but I would assume it works there too) is, e.g.,
>
>     rm -- -foo
>
> i.e., double dashes to nullify the "-" option flag, followed by
the
> filename.

That does work. Thanks.

Alan

On 2013-06-04 6:58 AM, Alan Brown <ajb2 at mssl.ucl.ac.uk>
wrote:
> One user has named all his mailboxes with leading hyphens.
>
> ie:
>
> -foo
> -bar
> -bazz
How annoying. I have a user that prefixes all of their folders with a 
leading asterisk (*)...

-- 

Best regards,

Charles