scripted job to send mail

MidnighToker · 02-13-2004, 12:20 PM

I was wondering if anyone could help me (or point me in the direction of help) with regard to sending an e-mail twice a day.

I want to make a script that twice a day sends an e-mail to our SMS server e-mail account, specifying both subject and message, so i can keep checking that the sms server is working.

if anyone could offer any advice, it would be much appriciatted.

The Midnight Toker.

druuna · 02-13-2004, 12:34 PM

You could use cron (man 5 crontab) for the 'twice a day part'. As you might, or might not, know, cron is a (daemoned) sheduler.
You give crontab the times and point it to a script to execute at the given times.

Hope this gets you going again.

MidnighToker · 02-16-2004, 09:09 AM

i'd heard about this mystical cron daemon, but wasnt sure how to get going with it.

i dont suppose you know of any websites with tutorials/whitepapers or anything else i can be reading (other than the man entery) to get me going with this?

thanks, fligg

skog · 02-16-2004, 10:58 AM

man crontab <-- always check you man files TONS of information there

info crontab <-- always check your info files TONS of information there too

crontab -e ...some pretty good notes in the crontab file itself ... if youve used vi before it just opens in the vi editor

www.tldp.org

MidnighToker · 02-16-2004, 11:06 AM

oh brilliant.

VI(M) isnt a problem, its one of hte few things i'm happy with. As for info, its a command i've never heard of before now. Right off to play

Thanks all

DaHammer · 02-16-2004, 09:18 PM

Here is a perl script that you can use to send the email. It's not taylored for your specific purpose and has no error checking of any kind. But it will do the job. I use it to test new accounts sometimes.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# mailer.pl
# A simple way to send an email with perl, using Sendmail
#
# To Use:
# 1) Install/Configure sendmail
# 2) Change the below variables to your info
# 3) Change the permissions on this script to 755 (ie, chmod 755 mailer.pl)
# 4) Execute the script (ie, ./mailer.pl)

# ****************** MODIFY THE BELOW VARIABLES TO SUIT YOUR NEEDS ******************
$to='somebody@somewhere.net';      # Who the email is too
$from='you@wherever.org';          # Who the email is from
$subject="This is a test...";      # Subject of the email
$content="Testing email script.";  # Content/Body of the email
$sendmail="/usr/sbin/sendmail";    # Mailer program to use to send the email
# **************************** END OF USER MODIFICATIONS  ***************************

# Send the email
open (MAIL, "|$sendmail -oi -f$from -t");
print MAIL <<ENDOFEMAIL;
From: $from
To: $to
Subject: $subject

$content

ENDOFEMAIL

close(MAIL);

naflan · 02-17-2004, 12:34 AM

cron help:

Link

If using crontab (crontab -e), put in this entry:

min hour DayOfMonth month DayOfWeek user cmd

Ex. 00 23 01 * * /home/user/script.sh
will run script.sh at 11PM on the first of every month

Ex. 00 11,23 * * mon /home/user/script.sh
will run script.sh at 11AM and 11PM every Monday.

Ex. 05 20 * * * /home/user/script.sh | mutt -s "subject" email@address
will send the output of script.sh to email@address with subject "subject" at 8:05PM every day. (provided you have mutt installed and configured)

crontab is for user jobs. For system jobs, put a script in /etc/cron/cron.daily or cron.hourly or cron.weekly, etc.

MidnighToker · 02-17-2004, 08:39 AM

ok, this is all starting to make sense.

i'm off work untill Monday, but i'll no doubt be logging in and playing about.

thanks for all the help.