this is a silly question, but somehow I can't get this working:
in my /etc/aliases I have a line like this:
fax: "|/test/myscript"

That's supposed to pipe mail sent to account fax to a bash script for processing.

In /test/myscript I have :
The line beginning with "myresult" is supposed to set this variable to contain "/tmp/" plus whatever is being output by a python script in /test/unpack.py
That unpack.py is supposed to receive incoming message on it's stdin, process it, sotre some data in a file in /tmp and give that file's name on it's stdout to be put in "myresult"

I can't figure out how to feed my e-mail through the bash script into the python script. I've checked my python script by cat myemaildump | unpack.py, works fine.

I checked silly stuff like paths, permissions, disabled sendmail's smrsh functionality to allow insecure scripts ( the machine sits on private network, not reachable from outside). /var/log/maillog indicates that the message was sent sucessfully to "|/test/myscript", but python script never sees the data.

What am I doing wrong?

Since you are piping into the bash script you will need to use "read" to get the data from stdin then echo that into a pipe to your paython script.

You can pipe your script's stdin to the command's stdin with <&0. Like this:
I know this is 8 years later but this page ranks highly for "redirect stdin script", etc.

1 members found this post helpful.

The problem is, that after this long time it’s hard to tell what the real cause of the problem was and whether it was solved. Did the shell’s behavior changed over time? For bash version 3 it’s neither necessary to use read for the stdin to feed it to another command or sub-shell, nor to specify <&0 inside a command substitution. It’s mostly used to restore the original stdin after you changed it to something else.No read here, no <&0. I use this in some wrappers to add some lines to an email like: