Shell Programming and Scripting

If the attachment is zipped, it needs to be in the mail as a binary 8 bit inclusion, or be uuencoded or base-64 encoded, which is about the same thing with different 64 symbols for 6 bits. You are getting into unpacking and repacking a esmtp email with all the mime types it can include. If you look at an email in a flat file, you can see all the inclusions.

A shell should be sufficient, and as long as you do not read from the fd, it can be inherited intact by mailx. This sidesteps all the stdin decoding issues. Since I am not sure what you are up to at a high level, I can only guess you might want to know the command line arguments, but you could use () to send them before the rest:

Code:

(
 date "+Starting $0 at %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S."
 echo "User: \c" ; id
 echo "Host: \c" ; uname -n
 echo "$# arguments.
 act=0
 while (( $# > 0 ))
  do
   (( act++ ))
   echo "Arg $act is '$1'".
   shift
  done
 echo ======== Body ============
 cat
)|real_mailx -s "fwd_ml: $(uname -n) $(id) $(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:M:S') $$" your_id@your_host