It always annoys me a whole lot, when I'm writing some Unix/Linux shell script and I need to send an email with attachments - there simply isn't an easy way.
Standard mailx one attachment is supported and mpack is generally not available at all.
Since I found out, that some of the servers, I need to deploy my script to, don't even have uuencode installed, I decided to write myself a small standalone utility in Perl for sending multi-attachment emails.
There are lots of existing solutions in CPAN for this, but I specifically needed something, that's using only core Perl modules and sendmail - things I can count to find on every server.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use MIME::Base64;
if ($#ARGV < 2)
{
print(STDERR "Not enough parameters\n\n");
print(STDERR "Usage:\n");
print(STDERR "\t./send.pl e\@mail \"Subject\" file1 file2 ...\n");
print(STDERR "\t./send.pl \"e\@mail,a\@ddress\" \"Subject\" file1 file2 ...\n\n");
exit -1;
}
#Sendmail requires email addresses to be separated by comma AND space
my $to = $ARGV[0];
$to =~ s/,/, /g;
open STDOUT, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t";
my $boundary = "_----------=_10167391557129230";
print("Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\n");
print("Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"$boundary\"\n");
print("MIME-Version: 1.0\n");
print("Date: ".`date`);
print("To: $to\n");
print("Subject: $ARGV[1]\n\n");
for (my $i = 2; $i <= $#ARGV; $i++)
{
my $basename = `basename $ARGV[$i]`;
$basename =~ s/\s//g;
print("\n--".$boundary."\n");
print("Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64\n");
print("Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name=\"$basename\"\n\n");
local $/=undef;
open FILE, $ARGV[$i] or die "Couldn't open file $ARGV[$i]";
binmode FILE;
my $content = <FILE>;
close FILE;
print encode_base64($content)."\n\n";
}
print("--$boundary\n.\n");
The code depends on two things:
sendmailbeing available in/usr/sbin- Perl core module
MIME::Base64- every standard Perl installation has this.
There is a little issue in the code - the MIME boundary is hard coded and not checked for uniqueness, but since we're using Base64 there is not much possibility of a clash.
