Why 'man mail' didn't help me much
Adam Davis
a.l.d at att.net
Mon Apr 8 22:03:13 CDT 2002
A week (?) ago I asked for help. I was attempting to send mail w/
attachments from a bash script to be run by crond, in order to email a
user .tar.gz files files so that, in the event of a crash, we had copies
of the files other than the local backups. I got a lot of 'man mail' as
response. The problem with 'mail' is that it didn't deal directly with
attachments, but I got around that. The really big problem with 'mail'
is that it wanted me to Ctrl-D my way out, which I was having problems
doing from a script that wasn't supposed to be interactive.
I simplified the more difficult part and borrowed a pre-written script
that would take file-names as arguments and automatically run all the
requested encoding. (You can find it at
http://home.clara.net/dwotton/unix/mail_files.txt)
However, I was still getting trapped in a mailer that wanted me to
Ctrl-D out.
I learned a neat little trick this weekend - echo $'x04' ... It took
awhile to find a file that specifically mentioned that you can, in fact,
force in such things as Ctrl-D (the ASCII EOT character, 0x04
hexadecimal) without being around to type Ctrl-D. Almost every file I
came across had ^D, and then said you had to type that in yourself...
That's not true.
It is incredibly easy to do, once you figure out how. Not mentioned
anywhere, though, that I could find - emailing attachments without
interaction. It's certainly not mentioned in 'man mail'...
~ald
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