The '<' is something that the shell interprets, but in the multi-arg form of system the shell is bypassed altogether, and '<' is being passed as another argument to mail. Try this instead:

my $address = 'myname@whatever.com';
my $subject = "Comments -- Version: $Version ID: $ID";
system("mail $address -s '$subject' < blah6.txt") == 0
  or die "mail failed: $?";
[download]

Update: As ikegami's reply below alludes to, a major reason for using the multi-arg form of system is precisely to bypass the shell, and therefore avoid shell quoting headaches. The single argument form of system may not be suitable if $Version or $ID contain problematic characters. If this is the case, I would break down and read in the contents of the input file, and pipe it into the mail command from within the Perl code.

You better make sure $Version and $ID don't contain single quotes or slashes or ... if you use this version of system.

Followed your advice to the letter. I get a message sent page as I should, but the message never arrives. Any thoughts?

That sounds to me like a bad e-mail address. If the e-mail address was given in a double-quoted string, did you escape (i.e. backslash) the @? (If not, in addition to doing that, you should be running this under strict, because under strict an unescaped @ in a double-quoted string would have most likely caused the compilation to fail, thereby alerting you to the problem; it's a good thing to do in general.) And, as ikegami noted, what are the strings in $Version and $ID?

BTW, I tried a similar short script, and it worked fine; this is what I ran:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $address = 'myaddress@myhost.com';
my $subject = 'nothing';
system( "mail $address -s $subject < random.txt" ) == 0
  or die "mail failed: $?";
[download]

the lowliest monk

cheers

SK

To send mail from a Perl program, you have at least four choices:

1. Use a MUA (mail user agent). e.g. mail, mailx
2. Use a MTA (mail transport agent), e.g. sendmail
3. Connect to a SMTP server
4. Use a CPAN module

I personally use the Mail::Mailer CPAN module, which hides these choices behind a simple interface. The recent Perl Email Project, see Email::Simple, started by Simon Cozens and now maintained by Casey West, is worth a look, though I haven't used it.

Mail::Mailer is OK but forks a process without telling you, which can cause some goofiness that bit me in the ass.

See http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=459739

I recommend MIME::Simple.