Shell script to send email
Yes it works fine and is commonly used:
$ echo "hello world" | mail -s "a subject" someone@somewhere.com
Sending a mail from a linux shell script
If the server is well configured, eg it has an up and running MTA, you can just use the mail command.
For instance, to send the content of a file, you can do this:
$ cat /path/to/file | mail -s "your subject" your@email.com
man mail
for more details.
Sending HTML mail using a shell script
First you need to compose the message. The bare minimum is composed of these two headers:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
... and the appropriate message body:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head><title></title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello, world!</p>
</body>
</html>
Once you have it, you can pass the appropriate information to the mail command:
body = '...'
echo $body | mail \
-a "From: me@example.com" \
-a "MIME-Version: 1.0" \
-a "Content-Type: text/html" \
-s "This is the subject" \
you@example.com
This is an oversimplified example, since you also need to take care of charsets, encodings, maximum line length... But this is basically the idea.
Alternatively, you can write your script in Perl or PHP rather than plain shell.
Update
A shell script is basically a text file with Unix line endings that starts with a line called shebang that tells the shell what interpreter it must pass the file to, follow some commands in the language the interpreter understands and has execution permission (in Unix that's a file attribute). E.g., let's say you save the following as hello-world
:
#!/bin/sh
echo Hello, world!
Then you assign execution permission:
chmod +x hello-world
And you can finally run it:
./hello-world
Whatever, this is kind of unrelated to the original question. You should get familiar with basic shell scripting before doing advanced tasks with it. Here you are a couple of links about bash, a popular shell:
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/index.html
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html
Sending bcc email to recipient using shell script mail utility
MAIL(1) BSD General Commands Manual MAIL(1)
NAME
mail - send and receive mail
SYNOPSIS
mail [-iInv] [-s subject] [-c cc-addr] [-b bcc-addr] to-addr... [-- sendmail-options...]
mail [-iInNv] -f [name]
mail [-iInNv] [-u user]
-c Send carbon copies to list of users.
-b Send blind carbon copies to list. List should be a comma-separated list of names.
The command is(I have tested it on CentOS6.x):
echo -e "body" | mail -S smtp=localhost -s "Test subject 1" -b bccuser@gmail.com user@gmail.com
The to-addr
is after cc-addr
and bcc-addr
How do I send a file as an email attachment using Linux command line?
None of the mutt ones worked for me. It was thinking the email address was part of the attachment. Had to do:
echo "This is the message body" | mutt -a "/path/to/file.to.attach" -s "subject of message" -- recipient@domain.example
Sending email using unix shell scripting
You forgot the quotes:
echo $body | mail $receiver -s "$subj"
Note that you must use double quotes (otherwise, the variable won't be expanded).
Now the question is: Why double quotes around $subj
and not $body
or $receiver
. The answer is that echo
doesn't care about the number of arguments. So if $body
expands to several words, echo
will just print all of them with a single space in between. Here, the quotes would only matter if you wanted to preserve double spaces.
As for $receiver
, this works because it expands only to a single word (no spaces). It would break for mail addresses like John Doe <doe@none.com>
.
Related Topics
How to Export the Variable Through Script File
Negate If Condition in Bash Script
How to Decode /Proc/Pid/Pagemap Entries in Linux
Linux Time Command Microseconds or Better Accuracy
Get Yesterday's Date in Bash on Linux, Dst-Safe
Find a Pattern in Files and Rename Them
Where Does Eclipse Look for Eclipse.Ini Under Linux
How to Pass Parameters to a Bash Script
What Do the Numbers in /Proc/Loadavg Mean on Linux
How I Could Add Dir to $Path in Makefile
Just Black Screen After Running Qemu
Sending Udp Packets from the Linux Kernel
What's the Point of Eval/Bash -C as Opposed to Just Evaluating a Variable
How to Download a Tarball from Github Using Curl
How Do Applications Resolve to Different Versions of Shared Libraries at Run Time