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

I am attempting to send a file that has been created by a
Perl script to an email address. I am merely adding this
feature to the script, and this is the first time I have
worked with PerlBelow is some of the code:

$rptname= "summary".$date.".txt";

print "Date:   ",$date,"\n";
print "Report:  ", $rptname,"\n";
open (RPT, "> $rptname") || warn "Unable to open report file: $!\n";
system (mailx -s \"Summary Report\" myname\@mycompany.com < $rptname")
+;

[download]


I would greatly appreciate any help that can be given. Thank you

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: How to send email
by btrott (Parson) on Jul 06, 2000 at 01:09 UTC
    What file are you trying to send? The file at $rptname? Because with your open line, you just wiped out the contents of $rptname. Whatever was in there before is now gone, so there's nothing to feed into mailx.

    Do you need to create a file? You could do all of this in memory. Just create a scalar that contains your mail message. Then send it using one of the Mail:: modules. Mail::Mailer may do what you want: 

        use Mail::Mailer;

    my $mailer = new Mail::Mailer 'sendmail';

    $mailer->open( {
        To => 'foo@bar.com',
        Subject => 'Report' } );

    ## Create report in scalar $report... then write it.
    print $mailer $report;
    $mailer->close;

    [download]
    You can also use SMTP or mail to send your mail.
[reply]
[d/l]
      Just as a quick addition to btrott's comment on using smtp, as an example you could glance at this quick little post I made a few days back here I think it could fit right into the program easily..
[reply]
Re: How to send email
by ZZamboni (Curate) on Jul 06, 2000 at 04:12 UTC
[reply]
Re: How to send email
by httptech (Chaplain) on Jul 06, 2000 at 01:07 UTC
    It looks like you are missing the leading quotation mark in your system call. Running perl -wc on your code will help you find small errors like this.

    Update: I ran perl -wc on this code and it didn't spit out any errors, so it wouldn't have helped you in this case. It's still a good idea to use it though :)

    I would try and shy away from writing the mail to a temp file though; it will be a headache for you if the directory or file permissions ever get changed. I would probably do something like: 

    open (MAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -oi -em")
    || die "Couldn't open sendmail: $!";
print MAIL <<EOM;
To: me\@mycompany.com
From: myscript\@mycompany.com
Subject: Some subject

$reportdata
EOM
close (MAIL);

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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