mail: piping command output to mail with subject

[cmayo]

Hi all,

Hoping someone might know the answer to this... I'm looking for a simple way to send the output of a shell script via email (on Solaris), and I'd like to include From: and Subject: headers in those mails. Google hasn't been much help -- seems most of the mail command resources involve reading mail.

In a simple form, what I'm doing is this:

ls -l | mail myname@myhost.com

Mail arrives from root@myhost with no subject line. I'd like to specify a subject, as well as a From: address

Thanks in advance,
Chuck

 

[cspilman]

what about:

ls -l | mail -s "Subject" myname@myhost.com



Regards,
Chuck

 

[cmayo]

Good thought, but didn't work. The mail command seems to look for headers in the body of the mail. For example, this works just fine:

bash-2.05# mail myname@myhost.com
Subject: My Subject
From: myrealname@myotherhost.com

Hello there
^D

The mail man pages don't seem to cite any switches for specifying haders.

When piping command output to mail, there's no opportunity to prepend text to the output. Or is there? I suppose if I could figure out a way to include my command output in a cat statement, I could do something like:

cat 'Subject:My Subject\nFrom:myrealname@myotherhost.com\n' MYCOMMANDOUTPUT | mail myname@myhost.com

I'm probably making this way too hard...

 

[cspilman]

what about using mailx instead of mail like this:

ls -l | mailx -s "Subject" myname@myhost.com

Regards,
Chuck

 

[PHV]

And what about something like this ?
(echo "Subject:My Subject\nFrom:myrealname@myotherhost.com\n"; mycommand) | mail myname@myhost.com

Hope This Helps, PH.
Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at FAQ219-2884 or FAQ181-2886

 

[cmayo]

Chuck, thanks much. mailx will definitely work. I don't see a way to specify a FROM address but can specify a subject with -s, and that'll get me the basic functionality I need.

PH, turns out echo command is executed as a separate command from the command piped to mail and just outputs to the shell before the command is run.

Thanks again,
Chuck

 

[cspilman]

No problem.

As far as the FROM address issue, are you talking wanting it to show something like "Super User Account" instead of root@myhost.com? If so, then you will need to fill in the comment field in /etc/passwd on the server which is what it will use for that.



Regards,
Chuck

 

[PHV]

echo command is executed as a separate command
It shouldn't as it's inside parens ...

 

[cmayo]

Nah, just wanted the reply-to address to point to someone else's mailbox. Turns out mailx accepts a reply-to switch:

mailx -r "anotheremail@server.com"

I'm golden!

Thanks again.