Shell Programming and Scripting

i found the issue, but not the solution.
when i output to a file, all is fine with no issue.
the issue is with the mail command, it changes the output for some reason:
echo $OUTPUT |mail -s "Printer Summery" email@exapmle.com -a "Content-type: text/html"

i tried with send mail as well, same results. will look for alternatives.

You aren't quoting $OUTPUT, causing the shell to flatten it(convert all linefeeds into spaces, etc). Try echo "$OUTPUT"

Otherwise, you'll need to tell us how, exactly, it's "not working", and tell us in more detail than you've been telling us before. If you'd mentioned email at all before, I could have warned you how Microsoft Outlook tends to ignore all formatting and impose its own unless you enclose all text in one big <PRE> ... </PRE> block.

found the solution using mutt:
mutt -e 'set content_type=text/html' -s 'subject' 'email@example.com' </tmp/output.html

That avoids the flattening problem by not using echo $OUTPUT at all.

I suspect sendmail, etc would work fine reading from a temp file too.