Hi Guys,

I have a file which has some mail body. and another file that is spooled from sqlplus which is delimited by "|". Now, when i redirect the contents of spooled file to mailbody.txt file. it is perfect but when the mail is composed with the mailbody.txt. The mailbody after mail is sent has changed the formattting of the tabular data format and supressed all the spaces.

How can I preserve the spaces in the mail.

Another thing is how can i check and capture the sql errors like database connectivity and space of the database has exceeded. Becoz i am redirecting the output of all the process to a log file.

Swapna

Using sqlplus in a scripting environment is pretty ugly. I remember having terrible trouble getting it to tell me if there was an error in a sensible way (i.e. setting $? as I would like). There are some SET commands which can help out, but I don't think I ever found a very satisfactory solution.

In the end I think I tried two approaches:

1. re-directing all output to a temporary file, greping for error messages of various kinds, and doing some post-processing to neaten up the output
2. giving up and using Perl/DBI.

Not sure about the tab issue, but it's safe to say the perl/DBI approach will solve that too.

Sorry if that's a bit vague - it's been a while since I used it.

Hi Matthew,

Sqlplus spool has given the desired output. But while sending the mail the mail command has changed the mail body format where mailbody was stored in a file.

The command used was :

cat mailbody.txt | mail -s "$mailsubject" $adminmailid

where mailbody.txt contains formatted mailbody which is as follows:


ETL Process Successfully Completed.


Measure Name ,File Name ,File Record Count ,Data Loaded
-------------------- ,-------------------- ,-------------------- ,--------------------
Cost - Actual ,data_vistaar_plant_mfg_actual ,121929 ,96
Field Units on Hand US ,field_units_on_hand_us_actual ,4775263 ,148881
Instrument Cost - Actual ,data_vistaar_plant_mfg_actual ,121929 ,96
List Price ,list_price_actual ,File Not Found ,
Plant Of Manufacture ,data_vistaar_plant_mfg_actual ,121929 ,96
Sales Amount - Actual ,sales_source_actual_ous ,47346 ,251321
Sales Amount - Actual ,sales_source_actual_us ,881847 ,251321
Sales Units - Actual ,sales_source_actual_ous ,47346 ,251321
Sales Units - Actual ,sales_source_actual_us ,881847 ,251321
Total Reserve - Actual ,data_reserve_at_mtg_cost_actual ,16009 ,5375
US Mfg Units on Hand ,us_mfg_units_on_hand_actual ,579525 ,122413

Oh I think I see.

Maybe you could send the file as a MIME attachment, rather than in the message body? I'm a Perl fan, so I'd probably use one of the Perl MIME modules to generate the message, but I'm sure there are command line tools for that sort of thing.

If you really want to stick to shell, install the 'nail' mail client, which can handle attachments. That'll preserve the formatting.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/nail

Hmmm, something's not expected here. The mail command should not be collapsing multiple spaces into a single space.

HI Guys,

I got know something like on the mail format. when i tranferred the file that i am inserting in the mail body to the windows machine and opened in the Excel.

The entire line was displayed in the single cell.
and i created the file through spool in sqlplus with colsep as "," and tried with "|", tab and some limitations of space.

can i get to know how to create a tsv file in linux through spool and use the same in the mailbody which will preserve the format.

Or else how can i convert a lst file to csv in linux/unix.

Swapna

Excel uses tab as the default separator character. It is not clear how you are transferring the file or contents to windows and hence to into Excel (copy/paste, directly opening a saved mail body?).

If you paste text into Excel that doesn't not have tabs, and does not have the proper line terminators, it will paste into a single cell.

I'll repeat my comment from post #6. The mail protocol is not changing the text formatting of your text body. It doesn't convert tabs into spaces, and it doesn't compress spaces into a single space. It must encode upon sending, and decode upon receipt. Any conversion is happening by your mail clients or other mail processing software.

This really is not a mail structure question any longer.

Create the output as csv in SQLPLUS (colsep=',') and import into Excel, specifying the filetype as csv.
Its in the menus somewhere