UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello all I am new and I had a question that I was hoping you could answer.

I am using mutt on a directory in this directory will be pdf files named 001.pdf , 002.pdf and so on. I need a script that can read the filename and associate that with a user like so :

if 001.pdf exists then email 001.pdf ( using mutt ) to user1 and then delete 001.pdf and continue until directory is empty. each file name will be associated with a user code and email address.

001 = user1
002 = user2

is there an easy way to accomplish this task ?

Code:

ls *.pdf |
sed -n 's/^\(0*\(\[1-9][0-9]*\)\.pdf\)/\1 user\2/p' |
while read file user; do
  : use your imagination here
done

era ,

Ive tried your reply and cant seem to get it to work. my other question was how is it supposed to identify the user based on the filename in your script ?


I want each filename to reference a user like 001=user1@domain via some sort of variable.


so when it attaches the file to an email it will know who to send it to .

mutt -s "userfile" -a 001.pdf user1@domain < msg-body

and then delete the file from the directory after it has been sent. and continue this step for each file until the directory is empty.

and thanks for your reply.

I meant to ask about how to map file names to users. Your example made it seem like the mapping would be trivial but I really meant to ask about that. It complicates matters somewhat.

So, you mean that in reality, 001.pdf should go to era@example.com and 002.pdf should go to n00by@unix.com and so forth?

Do you have this mapping table in some form somewhere? A text file, for example?

Code:

while read file user; do
  test -e "$file" || continue
  # continue to use your imagination here.
  # for example, start populating this with just
  echo file $file, user $user"
  # to see what's going on
done< pdf-to-user.txt

... assuming the file name to user mapping file is a space-delimited file called pdf-to-user.txt

a txt file would make more sense in my case for the users.
but yes you have the basic idea of things. each file name goes off to a different user.

ok so I created the txt file and it is in this format and called it pdf-to-user.txt ( im sure the following is extremely wrong because it isnt doing anything ( i do mean wrong on my part for not fully understanding) . the files are all located in a directory called /home/linuxguy/pdf but it doesnt seem to be reading anything how do I specify this ?

001 = linuxguy
002 = user2
##########
the script is as follows :
domain = unix.com
mail = mutt -s "mail" -a $file $user@domain

while read file user; do
test -e "$file" || continue || $mail
# continue to use your imagination here.
# for example, start populating this with just
echo file $file, user $user"
# to see what's going on
done< pdf-to-user.txt

That last line says where it reads the information from, after the redirection operator. I assumed you would have "pdf-to-user.txt" in the current directory but simply update the path name if it's somewhere else.

You can't put the variables in the mail command's definition because they will get their values only inside the loop. Also you need @$domain with a dollar sign.