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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mhmail

MHMAIL(1)                                                            [nmh-1.5]                                                           MHMAIL(1)

NAME

       mhmail - send or read mail

SYNOPSIS

       mhmail [addrs ...]  [-body text] [-cc addrs ...]  [-from addr] [-subject subject] [-version] [-help]

DESCRIPTION

       mhmail  is intended as a replacement for the standard Berkeley mail program (mail or mailx), which is compatible with nmh.  This program is
       intended for the use of programs such as cron, which expect to send mail automatically to various users.  It is also used  by  various  nmh
       commands  to  mail  various  error  notifications.  Although mhmail can be used interactively, it is recommended that comp and send be used
       instead to send messages.

       When invoked without arguments, it simply invokes inc to incorporate new messages from the user's maildrop.  When  one  or  more  users  is
       specified, a message is read from the standard input and spooled to a temporary file.  mhmail then invokes post with the name of the tempo-
       rary file as its argument to deliver the message to the specified user.

       The -subject subject switch can be used to specify the "Subject:" field of the message.

       By default, mhmail will read the message to be sent from the standard input.  You can specify the text of the message at the  command  line
       with  the  -body text switch.  If the standard input has zero length, mhmail will not send the message.  You can use the switch -body "" to
       force an empty message.

       Normally, addresses appearing as arguments are put in the "To:" field.  If the -cc switch is used, all addresses following it are placed in
       the "cc:" field.

       By using -from addr, you can specify the "From:" header of the draft.  Naturally, post will fill-in the "Sender:" header correctly.

FILES

       /usr/bin/mh/inc            Program to incorporate maildrop into folder
       /usr/lib/mh/post           Program to deliver a message
       /tmp/mhmail*               Temporary copy of message

SEE ALSO

       inc(1), post(8)

DEFAULTS

       None

CONTEXT

       If inc is invoked, then inc's context changes occur.

MH.6.8                                                             11 June 2012                                                          MHMAIL(1)