how to send an email via mailx with enclosed file

Question

I need to sent a file via mailx or mail, but I wat to sent it as attachment not in the body message. Is there any way how to do it ? Eventually is there any other tool in solaris which can be used for such as procedure ? Thanks

Answer 1

If your mailx doesn't support the -a option and you don't have access to mutt, and you don't want to turn to uuencode as a fallback from the 1980s, as a last resort you can piece together a small MIME wrapper yourself.

#!/bin/sh

# ... do some option processing here. The rest of the code
# assumes you have subject in $subject, file to be attached
# in $file, recipients in $recipients

boundary="${RANDOM}_${RANDOM}_${RANDOM}"

(
    cat <<____HERE
Subject: $subject
To: $recipients
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/related; boundary="$boundary"

--$boundary
Content-type: text/plain
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

____HERE

    # Read message body from stdin
    # Maybe apply quoted-printable encoding if you anticipate
    # overlong lines and/or 8-bit character codes
    # - then you should change the last body part header above to
    # Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
    cat

    cat <<____HERE

--$boundary
Content-type: application/octet-stream; name="$file"
Content-disposition: attachment; filename="$file"
Content-transfer-encoding: base64

____HERE

    # If you don't have base64 you will have to reimplement that, too /-:
    base64 "$file"

    cat <<____HERE
--$boundary--
____HERE

) | sendmail -oi -t

The path to sendmail is often system-dependent. Try /usr/sbin/sendmail or /usr/lib/sendmail or ... a myriad other weird places if it's not in your PATH.

This is quick and dirty; for proper MIME compliance, you should do RFC2047 encoding of the subject if necessary, etc, and see also the notes in the comments in the code. But for your average US-centric 7-bit English-language cron job, it will do just fine.

Answer 2

You can attach files to mailx using -a like so

echo "this is the body of the email" | mailx -s"Subject" -a attachment.jpg [email protected]

so long as your in the same directory as your attachment that should work fine. If not you can just state the directory like `

samachPicsFolder/samachpic.jpg