Extract/save a mail attachment using bash
Using normal bash tools (ie, built-ins or commonly-available command-line tools), is it
- possible, and
- how
to extract/save attachments on emails?
For example, say I have a nightly report which arrives via email but is a zip archive of several log files. I want to save all those zips into a backup directory. How would I accomplish that?
Solution 1:
If you're aiming for portability, beware that there are several different versions of mail(1) and mailx(1). There's a POSIX mailx command, but with very few requirements. And none of the implementations I have seem to parse attachments anyway.
You might have the mpack package. Its munpack command saves all parts of a MIME message into separate files, then all you have to do is save the interesting parts and clean up the rest.
There's also metamail. An equivalent of munpack is metamail -wy.
Solution 2:
The best program for this purpose is ripMIME.
It extracts the text and all attachments:
https://pldaniels.com/ripmime/
GitHub: inflex/ripMIME