I have a log that gets created from a bunch of cron jobs. My task now is to send specific logs (e.g. error outputs) as an email. What is the best way to get content from a file and send it as an email?
I have already figured out how to send email in perl. I just need to figure out how to read in the file and put it as the text of the email.
You can just slurp up the contents of the file like so and use it as you would any other string:
open my $fh, '<', 'file.txt' or die "Ouch: $!\n";
my $text = do {
local $/;
<$fh>
};
close $fh or die "Ugh: $!\n";
print $text,"\n";
What are you using to send the email? I use MIME::Lite. and you can use that to just attach the file.
Otherwise you'd just open the log, read it in line at a time (or use File::Slurp) and dump the contents of the file into the email.
I use MIME::Lite, this is the cron script I use for my nightly backups:
$msg = MIME::Lite->new(
From => '[email protected]',
To => '[email protected]',
Bcc => '[email protected]',
Subject => "DB.tgz Nightly MySQL backup!",
Type => "text/plain",
Data => "Your backup sir.");
$msg->attach(Type=> "application/x-tar",
Path =>"/var/some/folder/DB_Dump/DB.tgz",
Filename =>"DB.tgz");
$msg->send;
You can open a file in Perl in several ways.
What you need to know is described in perl -f open
Here is an example:
my $file = 'filename.txt';
open my $ifh, '<', $file
or die "Cannot open '$file' for reading: $!";
local $/ = '';
my $contents = <$ifh>;
close( $ifh );
Now just email $contents in your email.
I'm not sure how you are sending email, but the way I use frequently is as follows:
# Install these modules from CPAN:
use Mail::Sendmail;
use MIME::Base64;
sendmail(
To => '[email protected]',
From => 'Friendly Name <[email protected]>',
'reply-to' => '[email protected]',
Subject => 'That file you wanted',
# If you are sending an HTML file, use 'text/html' instead of 'text/plain':
'content-type' => 'text/plain',
'content-transfer-encoding' => 'base64',
Message => encode_base64( $contents ),
);