ring

I use this on a regular basis: its a perl script that picks entries from the file phonebook.txt, expands numbers out to whatever-one-dials (adds long-distance '1', international '011', or whatever), invokes the "cu" utility and dials the number over the attached modem. Even if the last bit doesn't work (no modem nearby etc.), the searching-on-someone's-name and expanding-her-phone-number is useful enough.

Setting up the script: (need linux or some other unix for "cu")

If you take the trouble to install the TermReadKey perl module:

click to download TermReadKey-2.14.tar.gz
gzip -dc TermReadKey-2.14.tar.gz | tar xvf -
cd TermReadKey-2.14; perl Makefile.PL; make; make install
cd ..; rm -rf TermReadKey-2.14 TermReadKey-2.14.tar.gz

then you get to use the nicer script, else you are stuck with this press-enter-after-everything script (which you download and rename to "ring", btw). both function similarly.

In either case, you might want to edit the script and change the second line to reflect the location of $phonebook = "phonebook.txt";

Usage:

ring
just does "less phonebook.txt"

ring sita
looks up my entry. likewise ring ssiyer, ring sitaram. It says

$ ring sita
Multiple entries for sita -
   1. <713-383-6279> - Sitaram Iyer, ssiyer, sita miyer r
   2. <713-527-8750!2265> - Sitaram Iyer, ssiyer, sita miyer o
   3. <011-91-22-839-0347> - Sitaram Iyer, ssiyer, sita miyer p
pick [1-3] or any else to abort ([ \n] defaults to 1):

and you do the obvious.