you can send mails from your shell scripts. Here’s a simple shell script that gives you a reading of the usage of space on your partitions and mails the data to you.
#!/bin/bash
df -h | mail -s “disk space report” name@domain.com
Save these lines in a file on your Linux server and run it. You should receive a mail containing the results of the command. If, however, you need to send more data than just this you will need to write the data to a text file and enter it into the mail body while composing the mail. Here’s and example of a shell script that gets the disk usage as well as the memory usage, writes the data into a temporary file, and then enters it all into the body of the mail being sent out:
#!/bin/bash
df -h > /tmp/mail_report.log
free -m >> /tmp/mail_report.log
mail -s “disk and RAM report” name@domain.com < /tmp/mail_report.log
Now here’s a more complicated problem. You have to take a backup of a few files and mail then out. First the directory to be mailed out is archived. Then it is sent as an email attachment using mutt. Here’s a script to do just that:
#!/bin/bash
tar -zcf /tmp/backup.tar.gz /home/calvin/files
echo | mutt -a /tmp/backup.tar.gz -s “daily backup of data” name@domain.com
The echo at the start of the last line adds a blank into the body of the mail being set out.
This should get you started with sending mails form the Linux command line and from shell scripts. Read up the “man page” for both mail and mutt for more options.