Next: Specifying Messages, Up: mail [Contents][Index]
mail
General usage of mail
program is:
mail [option...] [address...]
If [address...] part is present, mail
switches to
mail sending mode, otherwise it operates in mail reading mode.
Mail
understands the following command line options:
Attach file to the composed message. The encoding and content type are controlled by the --encoding and --content-type options, correspondingly.
Append the given header to the composed message.
This options sets the content type to be used by all subsequent --attach options.
Execute command before opening the mailbox. Any number of --exec options can be given. The commands will be executed after sourcing configuration files (see Mail Configuration Files), but before opening the mailbox.
Return true if the mailbox contains some messages. Return false otherwise.
This is useful for writing shell scripts.
Sets content transfer encoding for use by the subsequent --attach options.
Record outgoing messages in a file named after the first recipient. The name is the login-name portion of the address found first on the ‘To:’ line in the mail header. This option sets the ‘byname’ variable, which see (see byname).
Operate on the mailbox given by the first non-optional command line argument. If there is no such argument, read messages from the user’s mbox file. See Reading Mail, for more details about using this option.
Print header summary to stdout and exit.
Ignore interrupts when composing the message.
Do not display initial header summary.
Do not read the system-wide mailrc file. See Mail Configuration Files.
Print all mail to standard output. It is equivalent to issuing following commands after starting ‘mail -N’:
print * quit
except that mail --print
does not change status of the messages.
Cause interrupts to terminate program.
Sets the return email address for outgoing mail. See return-address.
Send a message with a Subject of subj. Valid only in sending mode.
Read recipients from the message header. Ignore addresses listed in the command line.
Operate on user’s mailbox. This is equivalent to:
mail -f/spool_path/user
with spool_path being the full path to your mailspool directory
(/var/spool/mail or /var/mail on most systems).
The program also understands the common mailutils options (see Common Options.
Next: Specifying Messages, Up: mail [Contents][Index]