The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

Recently I needed to send our team an email.  Yeah okay, so I email a lot, but this was different.  I needed to send my team an email from a server that was not anywhere near a mail server, and that was pretty paired down.  I did a bunch of Googling for answers and came up with quite a few that didn’t work.

I hate it when that happens.  So as a form of perl tutorial, I am posting my working script here as an example of sending email from a limited server using perl and the MIME::Lite library.

• Server:  CentOS 5.2
• Internet connection: Present
• Task:  Automation Scripts written in Perl

So I had perl, but how to send an email.  Well the first thing, is get the mail libraries.  On a Red Hat based server, this is yum install perl-MIME-tools.  You may have a different way.  But this is required for the sending messages in MIME.  (if you can’t install perl and perl modules, you may want to use CPAN)

Then I wrote this perl script:

—-begin code  —-

#!/usr/bin/perl
#declare that you are using the MIME library at the top.
use MIME::Lite;

#list files in /Email into array
opendir MYDIR, “/share/Email/” or die “couldn’t open $! n”;

#This will only grab files with “PDF” in their name.

#this will eliminate other files, and more importantly, “.” and “..” that are directories.
@contents = grep(/pdf/,readdir (MYDIR));
closedir MYDIR;

#we want to know how many files are in our list.
$fileCount = @contents;

#loop array to sendmail function
for ($i = 0; $i < $fileCount; ++$i){
$fileName = “/share/Email” . $contents[$i];
$Subject = “Alert Request for: ” . $contents[$i];
#print $fileName . “n”;

my $msg = MIME::Lite->new(
From    => ‘mail@yourserver.com’,
To    => ‘roy@TheIntegrationEngineer.com’,
Cc    => ”,
Subject    => $Subject,
Type    => ‘multipart/mixed’,
);

$msg->attach(
Type    => ‘Text’,
Data    => ‘Please read this file’,
);

$msg->attach(
Type    => ‘Data’,
Path    => $fileName,
Filename    => $contents[$i],
);

$msg->send(’smtp’, ‘mail.yourserver.com’);

#Remove File
$cmd = “mv ” . $fileName . ” /alert/backup/” . $filename . “.” . epoc . ” n”;
print $cmd;
system ($cmd);
}

—- end code —-

Summary

Basically this script polls the specified directory for PDF files.  If it finds one or more it grabs each of them and emails them to me.  Then, as a last step, it moves the file to a backup location to be archived.

There are probably other ways to do this, but this is a script that I threw together and have working on one of my severs.  If anyone want to add some corrections to this I will try them out and post my results.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 9:05 am and is filed under PerlTips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.