asked on

mail command in linux

I want to send an attached file using the mail command.

I have tried

mail somebody@somewhere.com -s 'File Attachement' < file.txt

This sends the file but not as an attachement, instead when you click on the mail, the file contents are displayed directly in the browser.

I have also tried

uuencode file.txt | mail -s 'File Attachement' somebody@somewhere.com

This attaches a file, but I am unable to view it when I click on.

Would somebody know what I am doing wrong, or possibly suggest a solution to this problem

Marlise

jlevie

That's because the "mail" utility can't generate multi-part messages, which is what you need to send a message with an attached file. Any of the more advanced clients can, such as pine, Netscape, etc., but not from the command line.

kiffney

Try 'mailto', which allows you to add a file by just hitting ~* in the body of the text - you have to type in the file name, and specify the type - like image/gif, or application/octet-stream, or whatever, but it works. If you don't have 'mailto', check www.rpmfind.net.

marliseb

ASKER

I want to be able to embed this command in a shell script that will be used by the cron utility to automate a certain task. As a result the mail / mailto command will not be able to have any user interaction.

Will this be possible???

I tried the mailto command, but it didn't work, can you give me more details please.

marliseb

ASKER

kiffney

when you said 'I tried it but it didn't work' do you mean, you don't have a mailto program? If so, do you have redhat? there's an rpm called 'metamail' that contains the mailto program - install that with
rpm -U -p metamail
(filling in the path to the RPMS directory and the full name of the metamail package). Or download it from
ftp://thumper.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/mm2.7.tar.Z, extract it with 'tar xzf mm2.7.tar.Z', read the INSTALL or README to find out how to install it, and then try it out. Actually, mailto runs from an interactive shell, so you don't want to use that, but the metasend program will run from a shell script, so try that.

marliseb

ASKER

No the mailto program is actually installed on Linux.

Can someone tell me more about metasend?

kiffney

Yeah, you just do

metasend -F sendername -f filename -s subject -t recipient -m Mime-type-of-file

There are more options and you might not have to specify mime-type. Install the metamail package - metasend is in there and will do what you want. I'd forget about mailto, that was a mistake on my part to suggest it as it won't work from a script. But metasend will.

marliseb

ASKER

No the mailto program is actually installed on Linux.

Can someone tell me more about metasend?

marliseb

ASKER

I tried the metasend, but it does the same thing as the others, it doesn't include the file as an attachment, instead it embeds the file in the mail subject.

I can't seem to work around this problem!

kiffney

I don't know, they work for me. Maybe there is something wrong with your mail reader. I don't see how the file would wind up in your mail subject - that just doesn't make any sense.

marliseb

ASKER

Sorry I mean the file doesn't get attached, when I click on the mail, the file is display in the mail.

kiffney

Well, if it's a txt file, maybe that's the reason. Try a gif file and specify its mime type as image/gif.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

philiph_elvis

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