2013-11-07



I have a bunch of cronjobs that just send regular  reminder  mes-
sages to me. I was tired of all those lines:

     0 0 30 * *   echo one body text line | mail -s 'speaking subject' meillo


I don't want to use the unportable percent-sign, which might have
been invented for this case:

     0 0 30 * *   mail -s 'speaking subject' meillo%one body text line

     Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless  escaped  with
     backslash  (,  will be changed into newline characters,
     and all data after the first  %  will be  sent  to  the
     command as standard input.  [0]


I rather wanted this:

     0 0 30 * *   mailme 'speaking subject' one body text line

It's now possible, which the following `mailme' script:

     #!/bin/sh
     #
     # send a message to myself

     if [ $# -lt 1 ] ; then
             echo "Usage: ${0##*/} SUBJECT TEXT..." >&2
             exit 1
     fi

     sub="$1"
     shift
     mail -s "$sub" `id -un` <<!
     $*
     !

[0]  Man page crontab(5) of Vixie Cron


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>