Howto send an email via the command line?

I have a script that first backups a db and then ftps it to a remote server.

How can I do a test that says if all that worked email me to tell me everything is OK, else tell me something is wrong?

It's a cron job btw.

Thanks

Amy

PS just the commands to email me would be fine, but the conditional stuff is a mystery to me too!

Can't really answer your questions when you don't tell us what language or shell you are using for your scripting. Perl? sh (Bourne Shell)? bash (Bourne Again Shell)? csh (C-Shell)? ksh (Korn Shell)?

bash on redhat 7.2 sorry :o

Hmmm conditional statements in bash are fairly straight forward

http://steve-parker.org/sh/test.shtml

As for sending mail you can use the linux mail command. Of course I seem to recall that when you run a cron job a mail gets sent to root regardless unless it was disabled in your scripting. Has anyone checked root's email lately?

Thanks, that test page looks good and should help me with the scripting side of it.

However, I was wondering if you could give me a hand with 'mail'.

for e.g. I want to do a test to see if something's worked and if it has then something like this to happen.

mail ( amygdala@home.com, subject="HEY IT WORKED", body="at so and so time etc." );

Now I know that isn't the syntax, but from the small mail --help it didn't help me work it out how to do that :(

Also, I was wondering how i might do the following (pushing luck here with you guys but I a newbie). Currently I run a backup:-

tar -czf sitebackup23-01-03.tar.gz /home/virtual/site/

I was wondering is there anyway of automatically getting the shell to put in the current date, so I can constantly automatically add to backups without overwriting previous ones?

I promise I'll stop asking newb questions in a bit!!! :)

Amy

if[expression]
then
mail username -s "Subject of Email"
Content of Email
Ctrl-d
fi

Thank you thank you thank you thank you.

Did I thank you? :)

Amy

Well i'd make sure everything works first. lol :)

As far as the backups do you mean put the current date as part of the file name?

Originally posted by Spookster As far as the backups do you mean put the current date as part of the file name? [/B]

Yep. Exactly that.... it would be better than using a static filename which would then get overwritten every time a backup was made.

Know a way?

Shouldn't be too hard. Just grab a timestamp from the system and use that as the filename.

Post the portion of your script where you have set the filename for the backup.

$mysqldump -uusername -ppword dbname > /home/amygdala/backups/dbname-DATE.sql

Anyone know how to add the date in dynamically using the command line in bash?

Ok try this:


$mysqldump -uusername -ppword dbname > /home/amygdala/backups/dbname-`date +%d_%m_%y`.sql

Just the job. Thanks :)