UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I have already read a lot of posts on sending attachments in unix...but none of them were of help for my problem...so here goes..

i wanna attach a text file and send to a mail id..used the following code :

uuencode "$File1" "$File1" ;|mail -s "$Mail_sub" abc@abc.com

it works fine...but the attachments are in binary format i have a wierd looking character at the end of every .txt file.... i want the contents of attachmnets to be in ASCII format...any ideas??? thanks in advance

Is the semicolon before the pipe character a problem in the real world, or just a transcription error?

There are scenarios where uuencode will not transfer correctly, but are you really sure the original file didn't contain that binary character? Can you run od or xxdump or something on the file to see what character code it is, and whether it exists in the original file?

One of the design criteria for MIME was to make it more robust than uuencode, and it should really be replacing uuencode since some 15 years already. The FAQ side of the forums has some scripts for sending MIME attachments, or if you have mutt or elm, I hear they can do it conveniently, too.

PS. Please don't use somebody else's domain when inventing example addresses; that address you just wrote is going to start receiving more spam again. Use @example.com which was created for this purpose, and doesn't receive mail.

Hmm. My uuencode (AIX 5.3) needs only one parameter, which is the input file. If you want the output to go to <stdout> as the following pipe suggests then either use "/dev/stdout" as output file or leave it out altogether, which will cause uuencode to use <stdout> as the default output device. In any case it is at least counter-intuitive (and might well be harmful) to use the same filename for source and destination.

I hope this helps