How do I send a file as an email attachment using Linux command line

Question

I ve created a script that runs every night on my Linux server that uses mysqldump to back up each of my MySQL databases to  sql files and packages them together as a compressed  tar file   The next step I want to accomplish is to send that tar file through email to a remote email server for safekeeping   I ve been able to send the raw script in the body an email by piping the backup text file to mailx like so     cat mysqldbbackup sql   mailx backup email com   cat echoes the backup file s text which is piped into the mailx program with the recipient s email address passed as an argument   While this accomplishes what I need  I think it could be one step better  Is there any way  using shell scripts or otherwise  to send the compressed  tar file to an outgoing email message as an attachment   This would beat having to deal with very long email messages which contain header data and often have word-wrapping issues etc

User · Answer

echo  These are contents of my mail    mailx -s  This is my email subject  -a  path to attachment file log email id example com

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mailx does have a -a option now for attachments

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I used   echo  Start of Body   amp  amp  uuencode log cfg readme txt   mail -s  subject   a b c     and this worked well for me

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Another alternative - Swaks  Swiss Army Knife for SMTP    swaks -tls       --to   MAIL TO        --from   MAIL FROM        --server   MAIL SERVER        --auth LOGIN       --auth-user   MAIL USER        --auth-password   MAIL PASSWORD        --header  Subject   MAIL SUBJECT        --header  Content-Type  text html  charset UTF-8        --body   MESSAGE        --attach mysqldbbackup sql

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I once wrote this function for ksh on Solaris  uses Perl for base64 encoding       usage  email attachment to cc subject body attachment filename email attachment         to   1      cc   2      subject   3      body   4      filename    5 -         boundary        blah        date   Y m d H M S                       print --  To   to          print --  Cc   cc          print --  Subject   subject          print --  Content-Type  multipart mixed  boundary    boundary            print --  Mime-Version  1 0          print --            print --  This is a multi-part message in MIME format           print --            print --  -- boundary          print --  Content-Type  text plain  charset ISO-8859-1          print --            print --   body          print --            if    -n   filename   amp  amp  -f   filename   amp  amp  -r   filename      then             print --  -- boundary              print --  Content-Transfer-Encoding  base64              print --  Content-Type  application octet-stream  name  filename              print --  Content-Disposition  attachment  filename  filename              print --                print --    perl -MMIME  Base64 -e  open F  shift   lines  lt F gt   close F  print MIME  Base64  encode join q     lines     filename               print --            fi         print --  --  boundary --           usr lib sendmail -oi -t

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Depending on your version of linux it may be called mail   To quote  David above   mail -s  Backup  -a mysqldbbackup sql backup email com  lt  message txt   or also   cat message txt   mail -s  Backup  -a mysqldbbackup sql backup email com

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I use mpack   mpack -s subject file user example com   Unfortunately mpack does not recognize  -  as an alias for stdin  But the following work  and can easily be wrapped in an  shell  alias or a script   mpack -s subject  dev stdin loser example com  lt  file

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You can use mutt to send the email with attachment  mutt -s  Backup  -a mysqldbbackup sql backup email com  lt  message txt

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Just to add my 2 cents  I d write my own PHP Script   http   php net manual en function mail php  There are lots of ways to do the attachment in the examples on that page

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None of the mutt ones worked for me   It was thinking the email address was part of the attachemnt  Had to do   echo  This is the message body    mutt -a   path to file to attach  -s  subject of message  -- recipient domain com

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using mailx command   echo  Message Body Here    mailx -s  Subject Here  -a file name user example com   using sendmail      bin ksh  fileToAttach data txt    echo  To  user company com    echo  Cc  user company com    echo  From  Application    echo  Subject  your subject    echo  your body   uuencode  fileToAttach  fileToAttach      eval  usr sbin sendmail -t

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From looking at man mailx  the mailx program does not have an option for attaching a file  You could use another program such as mutt   echo  This is the message body    mutt -a file to attach -s  subject of message  recipient domain com   Command line options for mutt can be shown with mutt -h

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Not a method for sending email  but you can use an online Git server  e g  Bitbucket or a similar service  for that   This way  you can use git push commands  and all versions will be stored in a compressed and organized way

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I usually only use the mail command on RHEL  I have tried mailx and it is pretty efficient   mailx -s  Sending Files  -a First LocalConfig conf -a Second LocalConfig conf Recipient myemail com  This is the content of my msg

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I use SendEmail  which was created for this scenario  It s packaged for Ubuntu so I assume it s available      sendemail -f sender some where -t receiver some place -m  Here are your files   -a file1 jpg file2 zip   http   caspian dotconf net menu Software SendEmail

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the shortest way for me is  file filename or filepath uuencode  file  file mail -s  optional subject  email address   so for your example it ll be  file your sql log gzip -c  file uuencode   file  gz   file  mail -s  file with magnets  ph gachoud gmail com   the good part is that I can recall it with Ctrl r to send another file

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Or  failing mutt   gzip -c mysqldbbackup sql   uuencode mysqldbbackup sql gz    mail -s  MySQL DB  backup email com

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There are several answers here suggesting mail or mailx so this is more of a background to help you interpret these in context   Historical Notes  The origins of Unix mail go back into the mists of the early history of Bell Labs Unix trade   1969    and we probably cannot hope to go into its full genealogy here  Suffice it to say that there are many programs which inherit code from or reimplement  or inherit code from a reimplementation of  mail and that there is no single code base which can be unambiguously identified as  the  mail   However  one of the contenders to that position is certainly  Berkeley Mail  which was originally called Mail with an uppercase M in 2BSD  1978   but in 3BSD  1979   it replaced the lowercase mail command as well  leading to some new confusion  SVR3  1986  included a derivative which was called mailx   The x was presumably added to make it unique and distinct  but this  too  has now been copied  reimplemented  and mutilated so that there is no single individual version which is definitive   Back in the day  the de facto standard for sending binaries across electronic mail was uuencode   It still exists  but has numerous usability problems  if at all possible  you should send MIME attachments instead  unless you specifically strive to be able to communicate with the late 1980s   MIME was introduced in the early 1990s to solve several problems with email  including support for various types of content other than plain text in a single character set which only really is suitable for a subset of English  and  we are told  Hawai ian    This introduced support for multipart messages  internationalization  rich content types  etc  and quickly gained traction throughout the 1990s    The Heirloom mail mailx history notes were most helpful when composing this  and are certainly worth a read if you re into that sort of thing    Current Offerings  As of 2018  Debian has three packages which include a mail or mailx command   You can search for Provides  mailx    debian  aptitude search  Pmailx i   bsd-mailx                       - simple mail user agent p   heirloom-mailx                  - feature-rich BSD mail 1  p   mailutils                       - GNU mailutils utilities for handling mail    I m not singling out Debian as a recommendation  it s what I use  so I am familiar with it  and it provides a means of distinguishing the various alternatives unambiguously by referring to their respective package names  It is obviously also the distro from which Ubuntu gets these packages     bsd-mailx is a relatively simple mailx which does not appear to support sending MIME attachments  See its manual page and note that this is the one you would expect to find on a  BSD system  including MacOS  by default  heirloom-mailx is now being called s-nail and does support sending MIME attachments with -a   See its manual page and more generally the Heirloom project mailutils aka GNU Mailutils includes a mail mailx compatibility wrapper which does support sending MIME attachments with -A   With these concerns  if you need your code to be portable and can depend on a somewhat complex package  the simple way to portably send MIME attachments is to use mutt

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metamail has the tool metasend  metasend -f mysqlbackup sql gz -t backup email com -s Backup -m application x-gzip -b

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Send a Plaintext body email with one plaintext attachment with mailx        usr bin uuencode attachfile txt myattachedfilename txt      usr bin echo  Body of text      mailx -s  Subject  youremail gmail com   Below is the same command as above  without the newlines     usr bin uuencode  home el attachfile txt myattachedfilename txt   usr bin echo  Body of text      mailx -s  Subject  youremail gmail com   Make sure you have a file  home el attachfile txt defined with this contents    lt html gt  lt body gt  Government discriminates against programmers with cruel unusual 35 year prison sentences for making the world s information free  while bankers that pilfer  trillions in citizens assets through systematic inflation get the nod and  walk free among us   lt  body gt  lt  html gt    If you don t have uuencode read this  https   unix stackexchange com questions 16277 how-do-i-get-uuencode-to-work  On Linux  Send HTML body email with a PDF attachment with sendmail   Make sure you have ksh installed  yum info ksh  Make sure you have sendmail installed and configured   Make sure you have uuencode installed and available  https   unix stackexchange com questions 16277 how-do-i-get-uuencode-to-work  Make a new file called test sh and put it in your home directory   home el  Put the following code in test sh      usr bin ksh export MAILFROM  el defiant com  export MAILTO  youremail gmail com  export SUBJECT  Test PDF for Email  export BODY   home el email body htm  export ATTACH   home el pdf-test pdf  export MAILPART  uuidgen     Generates Unique ID export MAILPART BODY  uuidgen     Generates Unique ID     echo  From   MAILFROM   echo  To   MAILTO   echo  Subject   SUBJECT   echo  MIME-Version  1 0   echo  Content-Type  multipart mixed  boundary    MAILPART     echo     echo  -- MAILPART   echo  Content-Type  multipart alternative  boundary    MAILPART BODY     echo     echo  -- MAILPART BODY   echo  Content-Type  text plain  charset ISO-8859-1   echo  You need to enable HTML option for email   echo  -- MAILPART BODY   echo  Content-Type  text html  charset ISO-8859-1   echo  Content-Disposition  inline   cat  BODY  echo  -- MAILPART BODY--    echo  -- MAILPART   echo  Content-Type  application pdf  name     basename  ATTACH      echo  Content-Transfer-Encoding  uuencode   echo  Content-Disposition  attachment  filename     basename  ATTACH      echo     uuencode  ATTACH   basename  ATTACH   echo  -- MAILPART--       usr sbin sendmail  MAILTO   Change the export variables on the top of test sh to reflect your address and filenames   Download a test pdf document and put it in  home el called pdf-test pdf  Make a file called  home el email body htm and put this line in it    lt html gt  lt body gt  lt b gt this is some bold text lt  b gt  lt  body gt  lt  html gt    Make sure the pdf file has sufficient 755 permissions   Run the script   test sh  Check your email inbox  the text should be in HTML format and the pdf file automatically interpreted as a binary file   Take care not to use this function more than say 15 times in a day  even if you send the emails to yourself  spam filters in gmail can blacklist a domain spewing emails without giving you an option to let them through   And you ll find this no longer works  or it only lets through the attachment  or the email doesn t come through at all   If you have to do a lot of testing on this  spread them out over days or you ll be labelled a spammer and this function won t work any more

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This is how I am doing with one large log file in CentOS     bin sh MAIL CMD  quot   which mail  quot  WHOAMI  quot   whoami  quot  HOSTNAME  quot   hostname  quot  EMAIL quot your email address quot  LOGDIR  quot  var log aide quot  LOGNAME  quot   basename  quot  0 quot     date  quot   Y m d  H M quot   quot   if cd   LOGDIR   then    bin tar -zcvf  quot   LOGDIR    LOGNAME  quot  tgz  quot   LOGDIR    LOGNAME  log quot   gt   dev null 2 gt  amp 1   if   -n  quot   MAIL CMD  quot     then     This works too  The message content will be taken from text file below     echo  Hello    gt  root scripts audit check sh txt     echo  quot Attachment quot      MAIL CMD  -s  quot   HOSTNAME  Aide report quot  -q  root scripts audit check sh txt -a   LOGNAME  tgz -S from   WHOAMI    HOSTNAME    EMAIL      echo  quot Attachment quot      MAIL CMD  -s  quot   HOSTNAME  Aide report quot  -a  quot   LOGNAME  tgz quot  -S from  quot   WHOAMI    HOSTNAME  quot   quot   EMAIL  quot       bin rm  quot   LOGDIR    LOGNAME  log quot    fi fi

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If mutt is not working or not installed try this-      bin sh  FilePath  1 FileName  2 Message  3 MailList  4  cd  FilePath  Rec count   wc -l  lt   FileName  if    Rec count -gt 0   then  echo  The attachment contains  Message    uuencode  FileName  FileName csv     mailx -s   Message   MailList fi

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From source machine  mysqldump --defaults-extra-file sql cnf database   gzip   base64   mail me myemail com   On Destination machine  Save the received mail body as db sql gz b64  then    base64 -D -i db sql gz b64   gzip -d   mysql --defaults-extra-file sql cnf

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Depending on your mail command options  check it with man mail  and version you could do  echo yourBody mail -s yoursubject -A  your attachment file john doe com

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If the file is text  you can send it easiest in the body as   sendmail recipient example com  lt  message txt

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Mailutils makes this a piece of cake  echo  Body    mail mailutils -M -s  My Subject  -A attachment pdf mail example org    -A file attaches a file -M enables MIME  so that you can have an attachment and plaintext body    If not yet installed  run  sudo apt install mailutils

[linux] How do I send a file as an email attachment using Linux command line?

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