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

In my perl script, I have following lines, 
Format REPORT = 
Test
.

Sub one
{
      open(REPORT,">output.txt");
      write(REPORT);
#trying to send mail using this output.txt file
     open(FILE,"output.txt");
     system("mailx -s \"Testing Report\" name@company.com<$FILE");
}

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I am getting error message 'no message' when I execute the program. When I use this same mailx at the shell level, it sends the mail with the content in the file What I am doing wrong in the code?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Mailx question
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 01, 2000 at 09:25 UTC
    You are using $FILE in your system() call, which you don't define, but you do have an open FILE, "<", "output.txt" right above it, so I think that you think that using $FILE at the end of the system command will use output.txt as the input, which is incorrect. The correct code would be 
    system "mailx -s \"Testing Report\" name@company.com < output.txt";

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    You could also open a pipe with 
    open MAILX, "| mailx -s \"Testing Report\" name@company.com";

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    and write to MAILX to bypass creating the file altogether.
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Re: Mailx question
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 01, 2000 at 11:51 UTC
    The security-minded answer is "don't ever use mailx". It's a big security hole waiting to happen since you cannot disable tilde escaping.
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      Tilde escaping is disabled as soon as mailx gets input from a "non tty". So if you pipe the input into mailx, tilde escaping should be off.
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Re: Using Mailx
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 02, 2004 at 08:02 UTC
    try this:
    open MAIL, "| mailx -s '$Subject' -r ReplyAddress $MailAddress";
print MAIL $MailMessage;
close MAIL;

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