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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Problems using Unix mail command (2) Post 302579293 by Clovis_Sangrail on Monday 5th of December 2011 10:55:14 AM
Old 12-05-2011
Problems using Unix mail command (2)

I recently generated myself the following error when attempting to use the Unix mail command:

The flags you gave make no sense since you're not sending mail.

There is a recent thread about this issue here in unix.com (with a title very much like this thread's title), but it was closed without explaining the reason for this error message, or at least not explaining the reason why I got this error, so I'm posting this message.

It turned out that I was calling the mail command and not giving it a destination address, even though I thought that I was:
Code:
cat exception_rpt |  mail -s "$BNK Exception Report `date`" $addr

I was reading email addresses out of a file and into the "$addr" variable, and executing the above command, but my file had blank lines in it! When I ran my shell script in debug mode (#!/bin/sh -x) I saw that each blank line resulted in an "extra" call to the mail command, with "$addr" set to a null string.

I suspect that this is the most common way to get the error:

"The flags you gave make no sense since you're not sending mail."

Last edited by Franklin52; 12-07-2011 at 05:52 AM.. Reason: Please use code tags for code and data samples, thank you
 

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mailq(1)						      General Commands Manual							  mailq(1)

NAME
mailq - prints the mail queue SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
prints a summary of the mail messages queued for future delivery. The first line printed for each message shows the internal identifier used on this host for the message, the size of the message in bytes, the date and time the message was accepted into the queue, and the envelope sender of the message. The second line shows the error message that caused this message to be retained in the queue; it will not be present if the message is being processed for the first time. The status characters are: to indicate that the job is being processed to indicate that the load is too high to process the job to indicate that the job is too new in the queue to process. The output lines that follow the second line show the message recipients, one per line. is identical to Options The supported options are: Show the mail submission queue specified in the file instead of the MTA queue specified in the file. Show the lost items in the mail queue instead of normal queue items. Show the quarantined items in the mail queue instead of the normal queue items. Limit processed jobs to those containing substr as a substring of the queue ID or not when is specified. Limit processed jobs to quarantined jobs containing substr as a substring of the quarantine reason or not when is specified. Limit processed jobs to those containing substr as a substring of one of the recipients or not when is specified. Limit processed jobs to those containing substr as a substring of the sender or not when is specified. Print verbose information. This adds the priority of the message and a single character indicator or blank) indicating whether a warning message has been sent on the first line of the message. In addition, extra lines may be intermixed with the recipients indicating the `controlling user' information. This shows who owns the programs that are executed on behalf of this message and the name of the alias this command expanded from, if any. RETURN VALUE
The utility exits with 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. AUTHOR
was developed by the University of California, Berkeley, and originally appeared in 4.0BSD. FILES
mail queue files for SEE ALSO
sendmail(1M). mailq(1)
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