Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,

I've managed to get my .procmailrc file to work. At least it triggers a script which creates a file. But the file is empty. How do I get at the data that's been piped? I've done much creative googling to no avail. I belive it should be in stdin, but I can't figure out how to access it.

Thanks
Mike

When procmail passes it via pipe to your script, your script might look like for example:

Code:

while read LINE; do
   echo ${LINE}    # do something with it here
done

exit 0

Not sure how your script looks like as you didn't show it to us.

Thanks Zaxxon,

I had tried variations of that. I don't really have anything to post because I was stuck at the beginning. Turns out the problem is with my understanding of procmail since your code works fine if I pipe to my script from another script. Here's the procmailrc if anyone has any knowlege of this stuff:

Code:

:0 b
|$HOME/test.sh

My understanding is that this should pipe the body of the email to the script test.sh. As it stands right now, the script is triggered but there doesn't appear to be anything piped. I've used your suggestion in a script named "test.sh":

Code:

while read LINE; do
   echo ${LINE}  > t.log 
done

exit 0

if I write a small script that says:

Code:

echo "test"

save it as t.sh and run it at the command line like this:

Code:

./t.sh|./test.sh

then the file t.log is created and contains the line:

Code:

test

If I send an email to this mailbox the script test.sh is triggered but the file t.log contains only a blank line. That's where I'm at and I realize this isn't a procmail forum, but any help will be appreciated.

keep it simple people..

Code:

#!/bin/sh
# Converts all lowercase text from
# stdin to uppercase
#
tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' < /dev/stdin

# edward
# ebaddouh@gmail.com

you should call your script as follow:

Code:

$ echo "keep it simple" | myscript.sh
KEEP IT SIMPLE

cheers

Try next cmdline, script caller set the output, script only read from stdin and write to stdout.

Code:

| $HOME/myscript.sh > $HOME/my.log

And myscript.sh, including also how to ex. to set uppercase without external command (ex. tr). Also no need to tell input, if it is stdin.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/ksh
typeset -u input
while read  input
do
     print "$input"
     # if you like to add line to some file, then
     # print some >> somefile
     # single > is overwrite = file include only the lastline
done

But if you like to put all while output to file then >> must be after done = end of while cmd.

Code:

while read line
do
     print some
done >> outfile
# or ex. done | outpipecmd > outfile
# all output, which are done between do-done goto outfile

Script are more generic, if script read from stdin and write to sdtout. Caller make define for input and output. Whole idea of *nix systems/commands - io-redirection and pipes.