I am NEW TO UNIX, AND BEFORE i posted this here, I did search a whole lot, BUT couldnt seem TO find the answer. I have, this requirement whereI have to read a file generated BY a SQL output, and send out an email TO the email addresses the file has with a specific content.

This is the layout of my file

Karthik 03/18/2013 Karthik@xyz.com

I am using the following command to do the processing.

awk '{print " echo This is a sample email for " $1 " sent on " $3 " | mail -s \"Test EMAIL\" " $3 }' /file_location/filename.txt | ksh

$1,$2,$3 refer to the columns respectively, and this command is working fine and is giving me the ouptut ( when i remove the | ksh )

This is a sample email for Karthik sent on 03/18/2013 | mail -s "Highly Skewed Table in User Sandbox" karthik@xyz.com

And when executed I am getting a mail like this

This is a sample email for Karthik sent on 03/18/2013

My requirement is to add a signature to the email such as this

This is a sample email for Karthik sent on 03/18/2013

Thanks,
Karthik

I tried including echo \n in between , but it is breaking the command and throwing out the error , command not found , for eg:

awk '{print " echo This is a sample email for " $1 " sent on " $3 " echo \n " Thanks" echo \n "Karthik " " | mail -s \"Test EMAIL\" " $3 }' /file_location/filename.txt | ksh

This throws out the error saying that command thanks not found, can anyone tell me what am I missing and how this can be done.

Thanks,
Karthik

try /path/to/mail in script.

I have to admit, this is a very creative way of doing this.
A few notes, though:
1) You have a mess in your double quotes. They should come in pairs. Also, quotes in shell do not nest (except for a few exceptions, such as command substitution).
2) Keep in mind that the \n sequences will be interpreted twice: once by awk and once by ksh. So, instead of making echo split the email into multiple lines, you actually make the awk split the command for ksh into multiple lines. You want those newlines to still be escaped when parsed by ksh. So, the solution would be to add one more backslash there, so you have \\n.
3) If you want to use escaped characters with echo, you need the -e switch.

That said, I still think that the " awk '{ print echo }' | ksh" construct is somewhat awkward. I think I would try something like this:

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millgates, I think you mean
Otherwise, this seems like the definitive solution.

--- rod.

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Ouch! I knew I forgot something Thanks for pointing that out

Thanks for replying, First of all, the while loop is working perfectly and it more than solves my purpose, thanks a ton for that.

But just out of curiosity, I wanted to understand where I was going wrong with the awk command, I tried \\n in the awk command, and though the command executes now, it still doesnt create a new line , it simply prints This is a sample email for karthik sent on 03/18/2013 n thanks n karthik .

Thanks,
Karthik

Did you use the -e switch with echo? Like

Oh, and those quotes must be there (so, in your example, they have to be escaped to survive their way to the shell) otherwise the \n will be interpreted by the shell (This is a different thing than what I was describing earlier - before, the shell would get the actual newline, which means the command would come as multiple lines; in this case, the shell gets the string "\n", that is a backslash and an n character, and will try to interpret it - the meaning of backslash here is that the character after it loses its special meaning, regardles of whether it even had one, so an escaped n will translate to just n).
I hope this is not too confusing. Let's see some examples:

1) In this case, awk will interpret the \n's and print:

the shell will get two separate lines, print the "Line1" part and then attempt to execute command "Line2", which it will most likely not find, so you get the "Line1: command not found" error.

2) Another example:

Here, awk translates the "\\" to "\", so its output (and what the shell will receive) is:

Now, the shell will translate the "\n" to just "n", so echo will get following argument: "Line1nLine2"

3) Another, correct example:

Again, in awk, \\ will become "\ and \" will become ". So, the shell will get

Here, the \n is in double quotes, so the shell will not try to interpret it. echo will then get the intended argument:
Line1\nLine2

4) Another possibility is just adding another backslash:

Here, two and two slashes will be translated by awk into single slashes, so the shell will get the following:

The shell will then translate the "\\" into "\", so echo will get "Line1\nLine2" as its argument.

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That was the best explanation anyone could ever give, thanks man.

Regards,
Karthik