Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I'm trying to write a simple script to take an email subject line and add it to a db. I've currently given up on getting procmail to work with my hosting folks so that leaves me with a shell script as the next option. I can set things up so when I receive an email the script is triggered, but I can't figure out how to access the email within the script. I tried:

echo $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7 $8 $9 > test.log

and:

echo "$1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7 $8 $9" > test.log

This was based on the assumption that when I set up the filter in my email configuration program, the email would somehow be passed as a parameter. (I'm using Pair hosting service, fwiw).

Any ideas?

Mike

It's not at all clear how the script is receiving the email, and what you want to accomplish with the echo. How is this script being invoked? (Why isn't Procmail an option?))

For what it's worth, echo "$@" echos however many arguments there are, with spacing intact.

If you are using some sort of .forward then it will be likely be receiving the email as standard input, not as command-line arguments. (The cat command copies standard input to standard output, or you might want to use tee.)

Hi era, thanks for the reponse. It's not clear to me either how the script receives the email but your stdin tip is probably the key. I'll explore that. As for the rest, I may have figured out the procmail issue so this could all be moot. And the echo was just for testing. Ultimately I want any emails sent to this particular box have their content parsed and added to a mySql db. A long way down the road!

Mike