I'm trying to excerpt a bit of content from 2 text files and to send it as the body of an e-mail using the mailx program. I am trying to do this as a bash script, since I do have at least a limited amount of experience with creating simple bash scripts and so have a rudimentary knowledge in this area. That said, I am not opposed to entertaining other scripting options such as perl/python/whatever.
I've gotten partway to where I'd like to be using sed: sed -e '1,/excerpt delimiter 1/d' -e '/excerpt delimiter 2/,$d' file1.txt && sed -e '1,/excerpt delimiter one/d' -e '/excerpt delimiter two/,$d' file2.txt outputs to stdout the content I'm aiming to get into the e-mail body. But piping said content to mailx is not working, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. That is to say that sed -e '1,/excerpt delimiter 1/d' -e '/excerpt delimiter 2/,$d' file1.txt && sed -e '1,/excerpt delimiter one/d' -e '/excerpt delimiter two/,$d' file2.txt | mail -s excerpts [email protected] does not send the output of both sed commands in the body of the e-mail: it only sends the output of the final sed command. I'm trying to understand why this is and to remedy matters by getting the output of both sed commands into the e-mail body.
Further background. The two text files contain many lines of text and are actually web page dumps I'm getting using lynx browser. I need just a block of a few lines from each of those files, so I'm using sed to delimit the blocks I need and to allow me to excise out those few lines from each file. My task might be easier and/or simpler if I were trying to excise from just one file rather than from two. But since the web pages with the content I'm after require entry of login credentials, and because I am trying to automate this process, I am using lynx's cmd_script option to first log in, then save (print-to-file, actually) the pages I need. lynx does not offer any way, so far as I can tell, to concatenate files, so I seem stuck with working with two separate files.
There must certainly be alternate ways of accomplishing my aim and I am not constrained, either by preference or by necessity, to use any particular utility. The only real constraint is, since I'm trying to automate this, that it be done as a script I can invoke as a cron job. I am using Linux and have at my disposal all the standard text manipulating tools. As may be clear, my scripting knowledge/abilities are quite limited, so I've been trying to accomplish what I'm aiming at using a one-liner. mailx is properly configured and working on this system.
The pipe only applies to the first command in the && list. You need combine the two into a single compound command whose output is piped to mailx.
{ sed -e '1,/excerpt delimiter 1/d' \
-e '/excerpt delimiter 2/,$d' file1.txt &&
sed -e '1,/excerpt delimiter one/d' \
-e '/excerpt delimiter two/,$d' file2.txt ; } |
mail -s excerpts [email protected]