I am trying to send an email with a subject and body. Here is what I have:

When I execute this command, it spits out "Subject: alert", and then sends the email with the body being "body stuff here".

probably this helps: https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...-into-sendmail

The first "echo" won't do what you want because the semicolon terminates the command specification (which is why you see the Subject header echoed to the terminal). The second echo provides the message body to sendmail because sendmail expects the body as its stdin, which is what the "|" pipe does.

You'd need to supply the subject to sendmail using a switch on the sendmail command line, much as you are doing for the "to" and "from".

"man sendmail" will probably get you only the syntax for running sendmail as a server, not as a client as you are doing here. Try "man mail" for the client version. For example, "mailx" uses a "-s" switch to supply the subject.

I use sendmail:


'-t' instructs sendmail to inspect the message body for recipients, not specify a recipient. This puts a recipient in the envelope, not the header, something to which many SMTP servers object. If you use -t you can put the recipients in the body: