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Full Discussion: How to read email using mailx in shell script or perl
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting How to read email using mailx in shell script or perl Post 302177263 by quine on Thursday 20th of March 2008 01:27:26 PM
Old 03-20-2008
Perl supports opening pipes to processes as well as files.... so...

open(HNDL, "mailx -args |");

That last character is a PIPE. I don't remember all the args you need (I think mailx by default first gives you only headers, but there is an argument that tells it "just dump the whole mailbox")

So now you can do something like

while (<HNDL>)
{
# do all your parsing code line by line subjects AND bodies
}

close(HNDL);

Now this is WAY over simplified, because after you dump the mailbox you have to execute mailx again like system("mailx -args bla bla bla") or die;
or qx|mailx -args bla bla bla|, etc to DELETE the mail you've just read. But you have to be careful that you don't delete NEW mail that comes into the box while you are reading so count the headers and delete only those perhaps with something like mailx -d1-10 or something like that... Also, I don't know what kind of mail might show up in this box -- could it have attachments, etc.

There is a whole other approach you might find useful... I used to set up special accounts whose only purpose was to receive email of a certain kind, etc. Like we would tell our trading partners to send all X12 data to xyzaccount@myhost.com or what ever... xyzaccount then had a .forward file and the .forward REDIRECTED the email into my perl scripts...

so .forward would be something like "| myscript.pl". Thus everytime mail was received by xyzaccount it would be immediately piped to the script, one mail at a time. No need to open and read the mailbox....

Now one issue there is that sometimes for security reasons sysadmins won't let you FORWARD email to a PROCESS (as opposed to just another address). We had no problem with this since we expected only ONE kind of mail in that account and the first thing myscript.pl would do is make sure that it was the kind of mail we were expecting. If not, we just quit, issue a warning, etc.

quine@sonic.net
 

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LEARN ABOUT MINIX

mail

MAIL(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   MAIL(1)

NAME

       mail - send and receive electronic mail

SYNOPSIS

       mail [-dpqrv] [-f file] [user]

OPTIONS

       -d     Force use of the shell variable MAILER

       -f     Use file instead of /usr/spool/mail/user as mailbox

       -p     Print all mail and then exit

       -q     Quit program if SIGINT received

       -r     Reverse print order, i.e., print oldest first

       -v     Verbose mode

EXAMPLES

       mail ast 	   # Send a message to ast

       mail		   # Read your mail

DESCRIPTION

       Mail  is  an  extremely simple electronic mail program.	It can be used to send or receive email on a single MINIX system, in which case it
       functions as user agent and local delivery agent.  If the flag MAILER is defined in mail.c, it can also call a transport  agent	to  handle
       remote mail as well.  No such agent is supplied with MINIX.

       When  called  by  user  with no arguments, it examines the mailbox /usr/spool/mail/user, prints one message (depending on the -r flag), and
       waits for one of the following commands:

	 <newline> Go to the next message
	 -	   Print the previous message
	 !command  Fork off a shell and execute command
	 CTRL-D    Update the mailbox and quit (same as q)
	 d	   Delete the current message and go to the next one
	 q	   Update the mailbox and quit (same as CTRL-D)
	 p	   Print the current message again
	 s [file]  Save message in the named file
	 x	   Exit without updating the mailbox

       To send mail, the program is called with the name of the recipient as an
       argument.  The mail is sent, along with a postmark line containing the date.
       For local delivery, a file named after the recipient in the directory
       /usr/spool/mail must be writable.

       If the directory /usr/spool/mail does not exist then the mail is
       dumped on the console, so that system programs have a way to notify
       a user on a system that does not have a mail spool.

																	   MAIL(1)
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