Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello All,

I am working on a project where the requirement is override mailx command in such way that, instead of sending mailing to email addresses coded in codes, it should send mails to one common email address at run time.
We do not intend to change the email addresses in codes.

This problem was temporarily resolved by setting up aliases in .mailrc file. But I need to take care of any future new email addresses for which everytime I have to define new alias.

I thought of overriding mailx command to a function with name as mailx() in .profile which does this for me. But in that function I will not be able to read the attachment file as in below example:-

Code:

cat $filename |uuencode abcd.xls | mailx -s "Subject" $eml_adrs

I want this command to send the mail to my email address at place of $eml_adrs with AS IS body text and attachment. at RUNTIME.

Is there any way?

Thanks in advance. Looking Forward.

Regards
Shubham

Rename mailx and put a shell script in its place that sends mail to you? What about other mail clients that talk to sendmail or port 25 or connect off host to some other system port 25? You probably need a rewrite rule, at least for your local sendmail daemon.

Hello,

Thanks for the suggestion.

The main problem with overriding or renaming mailx is how to read the attachment file from the origional command line as

Code:

cat abcd.txt | uuencode abcd.txt | mailx -s "subject" abc@xyz.com

How in the shell script I can read the attachment file - abcd.txt so that I can send the same mail to my email address at place of abc@xyz.com.

Regards
Shubham

It is just stdin. Your shell script can copy that by calling the real mailx to your address. .profile functions can copy stdin, too, but that is more fragile -- have to ensure exec is from shell, .profile is run, function is not bypassed by absolute path.

Yes, its just stdin, but I can read stdin by read command as

while read -r line
do
????????????
done

but how to copy the file attached is where I am struggling.

Also, I am not able to understand your last suggestion. It will be very helpful i you could explain by a simple example.

Thanks

Not so much having the shell read stdin, as pasing the inherited stdin to a child like the real mailx but to your address, perhaps with a subject expanded to show where it was going.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Today only I wrote a C code with the name of the binary as mailx only. This code is reading the arguments which are provided to real mailx command inside codes and then I am reading stdin to a file. If there is some attachment with uuencode , then writing it to a file as a part of stdin.

What it does is, it write the uuencoded contents in between begin and end. So I will extract all these contents and mark it as to be attached to mail. Rest part is mail body. Hence now I have attached part and mail body part read, and then with the help of arguments (-r... -s....), I am sending mail to me with arguments, attachments stdin contents and mail body stdin contents.

It is working well. But now next challenge is, what if stdin attachement file is zipped?

Any idea?