Home grown mail scheduler with bash script and cron

2013-10-04 2 min read bash Linux

If you are using Linux (Fedora/Ubuntu or anything else) then you do get a lot of tools and one of them is cron. Very very useful. Just write some script that can do the task for you, put it in cron and forget it. So, here is a home grown way to schedule mails.

First, copy this script below:

#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE: sched_mail.sh
#
#         USAGE: ./sched_mail.sh
#
#   DESCRIPTION:
#
#       OPTIONS: ---
#  REQUIREMENTS: ---
#          BUGS: ---
#         NOTES: ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka), 
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

mailfile="~/mail"
if [[ $(wc -l $mailfile|awk '{print $1}' ) -ge 5 ]]
then
    to=$(grep ^To: $mailfile|sed 's/To: //')
    echo "Good to send mail... to = $to"
    sendmail -t <$mailfile
    echo "once mail is send, delete the contents of file"
    echo "sed -i '4,$ d' $mailfile"
fi

Now, create a file called mail in your home directory, with the following contents:

To: Email
From: Email
Subject: Test mail from script.

Put the first script in cron to run every minute. And whenever you want to schedule a mail, create your mail in plaintext and then schedule that with at command to be appended to the ~/mail file. As soon as that file is appended, it will be sent out in 1 min 🙂

 

 

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