Shell script to send email [duplicate]

Yes it works fine and is commonly used:

$ echo "hello world" | mail -s "a subject" [email protected]

Basically there's a program to accomplish that, called "mail". The subject of the email can be specified with a -s and a list of address with -t. You can write the text on your own with the echo command:

echo "This will go into the body of the mail." | mail -s "Hello world" [email protected]

or get it from other files too:

mail -s "Hello world" [email protected] < /home/calvin/application.log

mail doesn't support the sending of attachments, but Mutt does:

echo "Sending an attachment." | mutt -a file.zip -s "attachment" [email protected]

Note that Mutt's much more complete than mail. You can find better explanation here

PS: thanks to @slhck who pointed out that my previous answer was awful. ;)

sendmail works for me on the mac (10.6.8)

echo "Hello" | sendmail -f [email protected] [email protected]

#!/bin/sh
#set -x
LANG=fr_FR

# ARG
FROM="[email protected]"
TO="[email protected]"
SUBJECT="test é"
MSG="BODY éé"
FILES="fic1.pdf fic2.pdf"

# http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipurpose_Internet_Mail_Extensions
SUB_CHARSET=$(echo ${SUBJECT} | file -bi - | cut -d"=" -f2)
SUB_B64=$(echo ${SUBJECT} | uuencode --base64 - | tail -n+2 | head -n+1)

NB_FILES=$(echo ${FILES} | wc -w)
NB=0
cat <<EOF | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t
From: ${FROM}
To: ${TO}
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=frontier
Subject: =?${SUB_CHARSET}?B?${SUB_B64}?=

--frontier
Content-Type: $(echo ${MSG} | file -bi -)
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

${MSG}
$(test $NB_FILES -eq 0 && echo "--frontier--" || echo "--frontier")
$(for file in ${FILES} ; do
        let NB=${NB}+1
        FILE_NAME="$(basename $file)"
        echo "Content-Type: $(file -bi $file); name=\"${FILE_NAME}\""
        echo "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64"
        echo "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"${FILE_NAME}\""
        #echo ""
        uuencode --base64 ${file} ${FILE_NAME}
        test ${NB} -eq ${NB_FILES} && echo "--frontier--" || echo 
"--frontier"
done)
EOF