Howto send an email via the command line?

[Amygdala]

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!

[Spookster]

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)?

[Amygdala]

bash on redhat 7.2 sorry :o

[Spookster]

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?

[Amygdala]

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

[Spookster]

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

[Amygdala]

Thank you thank you thank you thank you.

Did I thank you? :)

Amy

[Spookster]

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?

[Amygdala]

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?

[Spookster]

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.

[Amygdala]

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

[Amygdala]

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

[Spookster]

Ok try this:


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

[Amygdala]

Just the job. Thanks :)