Im in graduate school in Software Engineering. We use an email repository system built by the dean of our department that is used for students to submit their programming assignments to the instructor. The system is implemented using C shell scripts. The downfall of the system is that the student must be at school, logged in to their unix account in order to submit their program to the instructor.

I'm trying to find a way that will enable students to email their program to the instructor from home using their hotmail, yahoo, or any other email system so that they do not need to be at school to submit their programs. I'm trying to accomplish this by having a script run automatically when an email is received on the instructors unix email account. The script will check the first word of the subject line, if the first word is "XSsubmit" then I want to save all of the attachments to a directory (the files must be in the directory for the submit command to submit the files), then forward the entire subject line to a command prompt and run the command. Then this will submit the files to the instructors submission repository.

This is where my problem comes in. I need to get the attachments saved to the directory automatically, and then I need to get the subject field to a command prompt to invoke the submit script but have no idea how to.

I was going through some of the forum questions and saw that you are not supposed to post homework questions. This is not a homework assignment that I'm doing, its an entire project that I am working on that I'm trying to actually get into production.

Any help, pointing in the right direction like a book, website, anything would be great.