1

I am trying to make a check to see if the file being attached to the email is a text file, and if it is not it returns an error. However during testing, I provide a valid text.txt and it returns the "Invalid Attachment" message.

send_email()                
{
  message=
  address=
  attachment=
  validuser=1
echo "Enter the email address: "
read address
echo ""
getent passwd | grep -q $address
if [ "$?" = "0" ]
  then
    echo -n "Enter the subject of the message: "
    read message
    echo ""

    echo "Enter the file you want to attach: "
    read attachment
    attachmenttype='file $attachment | cut -d\  -f2'
    if [ $attachmenttype = "ASCII" ]
  then 
  mail -s "$message" "$address"<"$attachment"
  press_enter
elif [ $attachmenttype = "cannot" ]
  then 
  mail -s "$message" "$address"<"$attachment"
  press_enter
else
  echo "Invalid attachment"
  press_enter
fi
 else
    echo "Invalid username"
    press_enter
fi

}

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

Instead of 

attachmenttype='file $attachment | cut -d\  -f2'

you should write :

attachmenttype=$(file "$attachment" | cut -d' ' -f2)

See http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/expansion/cmdsubst

or to get mime-type :

$ file -i "$attachmenttype" | cut -d' ' -f2
text/plain;

and decide what you want to do with the file depends of the type.

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4
  • the part im trying to do it on is actually not for passwd, thats verifying the user. attachmenttype='file $attachment | cut -d\ -f2' if [ $attachmenttype = "ASCII" ] is where i attempt to identify the file Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 5:48
  • The cut command you are using should use the a whitespace as the delimiter, instead of a ``. That is what @sputnick has pointed out. Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 5:51
  • I changed it to what you said and i got 3 more errors -f2: command not found, unary operator expected, unary operator expected, Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 6:01
  • Thanks sputnick! the text/plain instead of ASCII did it for me! smooth sailing :D Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 6:21

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