Cron email with attachment

ahingert · 09-20-2010, 09:28 AM

Hi,
I hope somebody will be able to help me.

I am running a Cron job which mails the content of a log report every day. The problem is that the contents are sent as an attachment instead of as the body of the email. The strange thing is that if I run the instructions from the command line everything works fine, but if I do so from the Cron job the log report is attached instead of being sent inline.

The instruction I use is:

Code:

mail -s "logfile for cron" cron@example.com </var/log/cron-log

Following some advice I read on a blog I also tried this instruction in my Cron file, but the result is the same: it works fine from the command line, but attaches the report when run from Cron:

Code:

echo "Content-Type: text/plain;" | mail -s "logfile for cron" cron@example.com </var/log/cron-log

Does anybody know how to ensure the content of the log file is inline?

Thanks,
Adrien

Berhanie · 09-20-2010, 10:19 AM

You might be using two different mail programs. Find out which one you're using from the command line:

Code:

which mail

and specify its full pathname in the crontab.

ahingert · 09-21-2010, 12:12 PM

Hi Berhanie,
I tried what you said and found that the mail program was "/bin/mail" and used this path in my Cron script. The result is however the same: the log report comes as an attachment.

Do you have any other suggestion?

Thanks,
Adrien

Berhanie · 09-21-2010, 01:46 PM

/bin/mail, so far as i am aware, isn't capable of MIME, and so cannot send attachments by itself. maybe you can examine the headers of the two mails (commandline- and cron-generated) for clues. it may be that you're not sending the exact email both times, or that you're using two different mail clients to read them.

ahingert · 09-21-2010, 02:11 PM

Interesting, the headers tell me that:

Code:

User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.4 7/29/08

Isn't this another mail program?

Berhanie · 09-21-2010, 02:18 PM

yes. heirloom/mailx is capable of sending attachments (mailx -a file1 ...). do you see the header in both emails?

ahingert · 09-21-2010, 02:34 PM

Sending it from the command line I get the same user agent, but the encoding is different.

from the command line I get:

Code:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

While from the Cron job I get:

Code:

Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Any ideas?

Berhanie · 09-21-2010, 03:09 PM

The third item in this changelog says:

Code:

* When the text of an outgoing message contains illegal byte sequences
  in non-interactive mode, do not refuse sending it but send it with
  the "application/octet-stream" content type instead...

That explains how an inline message can get converted to an attachment. Now, you might
examine either the file you're sending or your crontab script for the origin of non-ascii
characters.

ahingert · 09-21-2010, 04:08 PM

Excellent, you've hit it right on the head: the problem was that I was including the Euro symbol in the report. I guess removing this should solve the problem. I will be reporting back.

Thanks,
Adrien

chrism01 · 09-22-2010, 01:31 AM

Another option: try using a sub-process

Code:

(cat file.log)| mailx -s "subj..." user@addr.com

ahingert · 09-22-2010, 01:53 AM

Thanks Chrism01, I'll try that as well.

@Berhanie: removing the Euro symbol did the trick, thanks!

Berhanie · 09-22-2010, 09:52 AM

good to know, ahingert.