This is useful if you have need to do port forwarding and your router doesn't assign static IPs, you can add it to a script in a cron job that checks if you IP as recently changed or with a trigger script. This was tested on Mac OSX.

It's very common to have cron jobs that send emails as their output, but the From: address is whatever account the cron job is running under, which is often not the address you want replies to go to. Here's a way to change the From: address right on the command line. What's happening here is that the "--" separates the options to the mail client from options for the sendmail backend. So the -f and -F get passed through to sendmail and interpreted there. This works on even on a system where postfix is the active mailer - looks like postfix supports the same options. I think it's possible to customize the From: address using mutt as a command line mailer also, but most servers don't have mutt preinstalled.

Joker wants an email if the Brand X server is down. Set a cron job for every 5 mins with this line and he gets an email when/if a ping takes longer than 3 seconds. Show Sample Output

Welcome to Jon H. (@fart), the new maintainer of CommandLineFu. . In the absence of a forum, I encourage people welcome him, here, in the comments. . Also... What would you like to improve/change about the site?

The uuencode utility will encode your file so that it can be sent as an attachment to an email. It is part of the sharutils package in RHEL/CentOS/Fedora.

This is a two part command that comes in really handy if you're running commands that take longer than you're willing to wait. The commands are separated by the semicolon(;) The first command is whatever you're attempting to do. The second commands emails you after the job completes. Show Sample Output

Replace "user@domain.com" with the target e-mail address. Thanks to alediaz for "$HOSTNAME" which is very useful when running the command with Apple Remote Desktop to multiple machines simultaneously.

Checks if a web page has changed. Put it into cron to check periodically. Change http://www.page.de/test.html and mail@mail.de for your needs.

I created this so I could send myself an email alert when a long-running job was finished, e.g., my_long_job.exe ; quickemail my_long_job.exe has finished

A cronjob command line to email someone when a webpages homepage is updated.

An easy one but nice to keep in mind.

This just reads in a local file and sends it via email. Works with text or binary. *Requires* local mail server.

Alternative to the ping check if your firewall blocks ping. Uses curl to get the landing page silently, or fail with an error code. You can probably do this with wget as well. Show Sample Output

For some reason the 2&>1 does not work for me, but the shorter stdout/stderr redirection >& works perfectly (Ubuntu 10.04).

This takes a picture (with the web cam) every 5 minutes, and send the picture to your e-mail. Some systems support mail -a "References: " so that all video surveillance emails are grouped in a single email thread. To keep your inbox clean, it is still possible to filter and move to trash video surveillance emails (and restore these emails only if you really get robbed!) For instance with Gmail, emails sent to me+trash@gmail.com can be filtered with "Matches: DeliveredTo:me+trash@gmail.com" Show Sample Output

Sends an email from the terminal.

if "mail -a" fail, try "mutt -a" or "nail -a"

This version uses netcat to check a particular service.

Run "ps -x" (process status) in the background every hour (in this example). The outputs of both "nohup" and "ps -x" are sent to the e-mail (instead of nohup.out and stdout and stderr). If you like it, replace "ps -x" by the command of your choice, replace 3600 (1 hour) by the period of your choice. You can run the command in the loop any time by killing the sleep process. For example ps -x 2925 ? S 0:00.00 sh -c unzip E.zip >/dev/null 2>&1 11288 ? O 0:00.00 unzip E.zip 25428 ? I 0:00.00 sleep 3600 14346 pts/42- I 0:00.01 bash -c while true; do ps -x | mail (...); sleep 3600; done 643 pts/66 Ss 0:00.03 -bash 14124 pts/66 O+ 0:00.00 ps -x kill 25428 You have mail in /mail/(...) Show Sample Output

Might as well include the status code it exited with so you know right away if it failed or not.

uuencode the file to appear as an attachment

on this way we can define the body too

Note, you need to replace the email address with your private Instapaper email address. There are a bunch of possible improvements such as, - Not writing a temp file - Doesnt strip tags (tho Instapaper does thankfully) - Shouldnt require 2 curls

Counts the number of new emails in the post office (or wherever mail is set up to check).