nkpgmartin has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'd like to use the following command:
@mail_command = ( "/usr/bin/mailx ", "-s" , "Subject" , @PPL , "$info +");
where $info = $var1 $ARGV[1]; the only way I know how to use mailx in a perl script is to input a file "<" , "$filename" so that the email terminates properly.

Is there a way to send a message that terminates properly and without needing a $filename?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: mailx
by merlyn (Sage) on Nov 29, 2001 at 04:42 UTC
    Besides what everyone else has said, mailx has a very important problematic security issue: you can't turn off tilde-escaping, requiring the content to always come from a trusted source. If it's an arbitrary file or field, boom, there goes your webserver or whatever. Bad.

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Re: mailx
by IlyaM (Parson) on Nov 29, 2001 at 02:56 UTC
    Why write unportable and broken code? Just use Mail::Send. It can internally use both mailx, sendmail or SMTP connect for emails while having exactly same interface.
Re: mailx
by Gyro (Monk) on Nov 29, 2001 at 02:08 UTC
    I haven't seen mailx used before. What I do know is mailx wants a file. Here are some other examples you can use.
    #!/usr/bin/perl my $mailprog = '/usr/lib/sendmail'; open(MAIL, "|$mailprog -t"); print MAIL "To: $SENDER\n"; print MAIL "From: $RECP\n"; print MAIL "$Here_is_where_the_body_of_your_message_goes"; close MAIL;

    or this using MIME::Base64, MIME::QuotedPrint and Mail::Sendmail 0.75 which will place a message in the body of the mail and encapsulate the message as a file. You will have to install the modules.

    #!/usr/bin/perl use MIME::QuotedPrint; use MIME::Base64; use Mail::Sendmail 0.75; %mail = ( SMTP => $SMTPSERVER, from => $SENDER, to => $RECP, subject => $Subject, ); $boundary = "====" . time() . "===="; $mail{'content-type'} = "multipart/mixed; boundary=\"$boundary\""; $message = encode_qp( "Text of message"); $file = 'message.txt'; # This is the file name $mail{body} = encode_base64( $message ); $boundary = '--'.$boundary; $mail{body} = <<END_OF_BODY; $boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable $message $boundary Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="$file" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="$file" $mail{body} $boundary-- END_OF_BODY sendmail(%mail) || print "Error: $Mail::Sendmail::error\n";

    Also look under snippits there is an example using Net::SMTP by khippy.

    I hope this is helpful.
    Gyro
    Update: Took out formatting code

      Save the world. Reuse code. There is no need to roll your own broken code (all MIME messages should have header MIME-Version: 1.0) for MIME handling. Just use MIME::Lite.
        Sorry. Didn't realize it was broken! This is stuff that has been out there.