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Old 12-02-2009, 12:24 AM   #1
gobeavs2009
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Registered: Dec 2009
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Need help creating a mail function....


Hello, I am in school, and no I am not asking for anyone to do my homework for me, just a little advice. I am completely lost and the textbook is pretty worthless. Okay so here is the question and what I have come up with, but it doesn't work.

1) The first function will be called m and it will allow you to send an email to someone using the mail command. The function should take the To: address, a Cc: address using the –t parameter, a subject line using the –s parameter and an input file. When running this function, you will type something like the following as an example:

m address1 address2 subject file


basically it would mail to address1, Cc: address2 Subject:, then Attach a file.

Here is what I could do, I am just really stuck so any help is appreciated.

m( )
{
mailto=$1
-t=$2
-s=$3
<=$4
}

I tried to use the redirection of the file for $4, but it errors out everytime, hopefully I am somewhat close.
Thanks
 
Old 12-02-2009, 07:37 AM   #2
carltm
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Location: Canton, MI
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The first challenge is to figure out how you would send an attachment using
email. There are several commands that can send email, but not all of them
support attachments. You might want to read through the man page for the
command line mail clients that are available.

Once you know the command to use and proper syntax, the rest should be easy.
 
Old 12-02-2009, 08:35 AM   #3
i92guboj
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Registered: May 2008
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Distribution: Gentoo
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If he doesn't know anything about scripting, the difficult part is going to be the argument parsing. The rest is trivial, just look at the man page of the mail tool and find how to send a mail from the command line, then paste that into the script. Since the script is not gonna rely on the order of the parameters it's not that trivial.

What I do on these cases is to parse all the parameters in case statement inside a loop. On each round, I check if the parameter is one of the valid switches, then the next parameter will be the argument to that flag (the subject, the attachment, or whatever). On each round, I use the "shift" command to shift the parameter list to the left, hence $2 becomes $1. And repeat until $# is zero.

Untested example:

Code:
#!/bin/bash

function die() {
  echo "Aborting."
  echo "Reason: \"$1\""
  exit 1
}

while [ "$#" -ne "0" ]; do
  case "$1" in
    -s|--subject)
      shift # $2 becomes $1
      if [ -n "$1" ]; then
        SUBJECT="$1"
        shift # yet another shift
      else
        die "Incorrect syntax."
      fi
      ;;
    -a|--attach)
      shift # $2 becomes $1
      if [ -r "$1" ]; then
        ATTACH="$1"
        shift # yet another shift
      else
        die "Incorrect syntax or couldn't read the file to attach."
      fi
      ;;
    *)
      echo "This is useless: \"$1\""
      shift
  esac
done

echo "The subject is: \"$SUBJECT\""
echo "I will attach this file: \"$ATTACH\""
I shouldn't provide so explicit examples, but well, I guess I am feeling well today, and anyway you have quite a few things to study and understand there if you are new to shell scripting
 
Old 12-02-2009, 07:05 PM   #4
chrism01
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Registered: Aug 2004
Location: Sydney
Distribution: Rocky 9.2
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Might I suggest

http://linux.die.net/man/1/getopt
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

Also, there have been several qns recently about mailing from the cmd line, so a quick search of LQ using the Search button at the top of this page would help you.
 
  


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