use email subject line as shell command Post: 61223

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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users use email subject line as shell command Post 61223 by tmarikle on Monday 31st of January 2005 07:02:03 PM

01-31-2005

Registered User

For the good or the bad of it, I've used systems similar to this before web browsers were widely used. In fact, one that comes to mind was Oracle's support site; albeit, commands were not issued to the O/S but were interpreted by some application running somewhere. You could submit trouble tickets, query status, etc. Another that comes to mind was an ftp service that would email you chunks of files that could be reassembled later on. This was useful when some networks were too young to offer more than email capabilities.

Your problem seems easy enough to solve. You're going to want to loop through all of your new messages issuing whatever commands necessary to save off the message body to the filesystem. Then, once the files are saved, launch your subject line command.

Here are some things that may help you get started.

Supposing that you wish to use mailx to process the message, you'll want to loop through the messages and filter on your key word:

For my quick test, I sent myself a message with "RunMe=ls" in the subject line. mailx shows this to be the last field of the output of mailx -H

Code:

$ mailx -H

N  4 Joe Smith     Mon Jan 31 16:44  111/2759  RunMe=ls

So I can run something like this and use the UNIX eval comand to process some of the text in the subject line (you wanted csh but I don't use csh; here's ksh):

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
mailx -H  | grep RunMe | while read LINE
do
    SUBJECT_CMD=$(print ${LINE} | awk -F= '{print $2}')

    # Parse more of ${LINE} and issue some command to save the message body to the filesystem
    ...
    # now run the subject text
    eval ${SUBJECT_CMD}
done

All this did was parse out the last field that mailx -H. The text following the "=" symbol was passed to the UNIX eval command. eval will execute the contents of the string ${SUBJECT_CMD}. The output happens to be that of a simple "ls" command.

Hope this helps you get closer toward your solution.

Thomas

tmarikle

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chsh

CHSH(1) 							   User Commands							   CHSH(1)

NAME

       chsh - change login shell

SYNOPSIS

       chsh [options] [LOGIN]

DESCRIPTION

       The chsh command changes the user login shell. This determines the name of the user's initial login command. A normal user may only change
       the login shell for her own account; the superuser may change the login shell for any account.

OPTIONS

       The options which apply to the chsh command are:

       -h, --help
	   Display help message and exit.

       -R, --root CHROOT_DIR
	   Apply changes in the CHROOT_DIR directory and use the configuration files from the CHROOT_DIR directory.

       -s, --shell SHELL
	   The name of the user's new login shell. Setting this field to blank causes the system to select the default login shell.

       If the -s option is not selected, chsh operates in an interactive fashion, prompting the user with the current login shell. Enter the new
       value to change the shell, or leave the line blank to use the current one. The current shell is displayed between a pair of [ ] marks.

NOTE

       The only restriction placed on the login shell is that the command name must be listed in /etc/shells, unless the invoker is the superuser,
       and then any value may be added. An account with a restricted login shell may not change her login shell. For this reason, placing /bin/rsh
       in /etc/shells is discouraged since accidentally changing to a restricted shell would prevent the user from ever changing her login shell
       back to its original value.

FILES

       /etc/passwd
	   User account information.

       /etc/shells
	   List of valid login shells.

       /etc/login.defs
	   Shadow password suite configuration.

SEE ALSO

       chfn(1), login.defs(5), passwd(5).

shadow-utils 4.5						    01/25/2018								   CHSH(1)