I need my script to send an email from terminal. Based on what I've seen here and many other places online, I formatted it like this:
/var/mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$EMAIL" << EOF
Here's a line of my message!
And here's another line!
Last line of the message here!
EOF
However, when I run this I get this warning:
myfile.sh: line x: warning: here-document at line y delimited by end-of-file (wanted 'EOF')
myfile.sh: line x+1: syntax error: unexpected end of file
...where line x is the last written line of code in the program, and line y is the line with /var/mail
in it. I've tried replacing EOF
with other things (ENDOFMESSAGE
, FINISH
, etc.) but to no avail. Nearly everything I've found online has it done this way, and I'm really new at bash so I'm having a hard time figuring it out on my own. Could anyone offer any help?
Note one can also get this error if you do this;
while read line; do
echo $line
done << somefile
Because << somefile
should read < somefile
in this case.
When I want to have docstrings for my bash functions, I use a solution similar to the suggestion of user12205 in a duplicate of this question.
See how I define USAGE for a solution that:
function foo {
# Docstring
read -r -d '' USAGE <<' END'
# This method prints foo to the terminal.
#
# Enter `foo -h` to see the docstring.
# It has indentations and multiple lines.
#
# Change the delimiter if you need hashtag for some reason.
# This can include $$ and = and eval, but won't be evaluated
END
if [ "$1" = "-h" ]
then
echo "$USAGE" | cut -d "#" -f 2 | cut -c 2-
return
fi
echo "foo"
}
So foo -h
yields:
This method prints foo to the terminal.
Enter `foo -h` to see the docstring.
It has indentations and multiple lines.
Change the delimiter if you need hashtag for some reason.
This can include $$ and = and eval, but won't be evaluated
Explanation
cut -d "#" -f 2
: Retrieve the second portion of the #
delimited lines. (Think a csv with "#" as the delimiter, empty first column).
cut -c 2-
: Retrieve the 2nd to end character of the resultant string
Also note that if [ "$1" = "-h" ]
evaluates as False
if there is no first argument, w/o error, since it becomes an empty string.
Along with the other answers mentioned by Barmar and Joni, I've noticed that I sometimes have to leave a blank line before and after my EOF when using <<-EOF
.
Please try to remove the preceeding spaces before EOF
:-
/var/mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$EMAIL" <<-EOF
Using <tab>
instead of <spaces>
for ident AND using <<-EOF works fine.
The "-"
removes the <tabs>
, not <spaces>
, but at least this works.
Here is a flexible way to do deal with multiple indented lines without using heredoc.
echo 'Hello!'
sed -e 's:^\s*::' < <(echo '
Some indented text here.
Some indented text here.
')
if [[ true ]]; then
sed -e 's:^\s\{4,4\}::' < <(echo '
Some indented text here.
Some extra indented text here.
Some indented text here.
')
fi
Some notes on this solution:
\
or replace the string delimiters with double quotes. In the latter case, be careful that construction like $(command)
will be interpreted. If the string contains both simple and double quotes, you'll have to escape at least of kind.The line that starts or ends the here-doc probably has some non-printable or whitespace characters (for example, carriage return) which means that the second "EOF" does not match the first, and doesn't end the here-doc like it should. This is a very common error, and difficult to detect with just a text editor. You can make non-printable characters visible for example with cat
:
cat -A myfile.sh
Once you see the output from cat -A
the solution will be obvious: remove the offending characters.
Source: Stackoverflow.com