Unfortunately for me, this particular workflow only works in OS X 10.5, and I have yet to upgrade my iMac past 10.4.11.

Undaunted, I replicated the same thing in perl. It turns out that the “Combine PDF Pages” automator action is a simple Python script. It looked semi-useful on its own, so I copied it from its normal home (/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/) to my personal bin directory for good measure. Perl source follows… please note that the >’s are rendering as literal >’s. Silly Code Highlighter!

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use locale;
use strict;
use warnings;

#############################
#  [01-31]      [yyyy-mm-dd]
my ($day,       $date,      $tmpdir,              $tojoin) =
(`date +%d`, `date +%F`, '/Users/shelton/tmp', '');
chomp($day); chomp($date);

my ($join) =
("python /Users/shelton/bin/join.py -o '/Users/shelton/Desktop/$date.pdf'");

########################
# Define PDF Links Here
#
my (%papers) = (
# Boston Globe
0=>"http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf$day/MA_BG.pdf",
# Chicago Tribune
1=>"http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf$day/IL_CT.pdf",
# Buffalo News
2=>"http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf$day/NY_BN.pdf",
# NY Times
3=>"http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf$day/NY_NYT.pdf",
# Wall Street Journal
4=>"http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf$day/WSJ.pdf"
);

######################################
# Loop through %papers
#  -> Determine tmp output file
#  -> Download the File
#  -> Add file to string for join cmd
#
foreach my $page (sort(keys %papers)) {
my $output = "" . $tmpdir . "/" . $page . ".pdf";
`wget -q -O $output $papers{$page}`;
$tojoin .= "'" . $output . "' ";
}

##################
# Join The Files!
#
`$join $tojoin`;

#############################
# Delete All Downloaded PDFs
#
foreach my $file (sort(keys %papers)) {
my $rm = "" . $tmpdir . "/" . $file . ".pdf";
`rm -f $rm`;
}

I suppose I could have picked more interesting papers (like, for instance, the Amazônia Hoje from Belém, Brazil). I stuck to papers from my current and previous home towns (and the NYC area, because they have interesting papers). Boring? I know…

I run this daily from cron at about 7am. Of note, I also redirect all output of the script to /dev/null because the python script throws a ton of meaningless errors that don’t mar the output.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Mail::Box::Manager;

#################################
# User Variables
#
# Set $password to your password (encoded):
# . only the low four bits of each character count
# . character 0x3f gets split into 0x?3 and 0x?f,
# . fill in the ?'s with anything you like
# . man ascii =)
#

my $server = 'pop.server.name';
my $username = 'username';
my $password = 'tSvx6!f>v7V%d=fU'; # the word "ChangeMe" encoded

#################################
# Get em!
#

my $mgr = Mail::Box::Manager->new;
my $pop = $mgr->open(type => 'pop3',
username => $username,
password => decodePassword($password),
server_name => $server);

my @messages = $pop->messages;

print
"33[00;30;1m:33[00;36m:33[00;36;1m: ", scalar @messages, " messages in mailbox :33[00;36m:33[00;30;1m:33[mn";

foreach my $message (@messages) {
	my $fr = $message->get('From');
	$fr =~ s/s+< .*$//; $fr =~ s/"//g;

	printf "33#733[1m %-28.28s %-45.45s33[0mn", $fr, $message->get('Subject');
	my $lbls = $message->labels;
	while( my ($k, $v) = each %$lbls ) {
		print "key: $k, value: $v.n";
	}
}

$pop->close;

#################################
# methods
#

sub decodePassword($) {
	my ($password_split) = @_;
	my $password = "";
	my ($high, $low);

	$password_split = reverse($password_split);
	while (length($password_split) > 1) {
		$high = (ord(chop($password_split)) & 0xf) < < 4;
		$low = ord(chop($password_split)) & 0xf;
		$password .= chr($high|$low);
	}

	return $password;
}

About three years ago I was living in the shell. I had a script aliased to ‘m’ that would run a perl script for each of my IMAP accounts and show me all of the unread messages. The script had been originally written by a fellow Help Desk supervisor at UB and then given colorization support by another fellow supervisor, Doug, who has since become a perl and python guru.

The trouble then was that, while this worked for my home email server, I had to change some of the socket code to work on all of the other IMAP servers I used. That wasn’t too tough since IMAP is a relatively straightforward protocol. Getting POP support to work looked to be a lot harder, however. I couldn’t find anyone that had written something similar for me to hack, so I wrote my own.

This script above uses the perl module Mail::Box which installs straight out of CPAN. It’s probably been updated since this was written, and I don’t even know if the script still works (who still uses POP??)