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linuxshellsmtpansi-escapetput

How to make a text bold in shell script and send the output using SMTP

I want to make text bold and send that output using SMTP as mail.

Mail configuration is done properly and i am getting mail.

But i am getting a .bin file instead of the printed line.

Please help me with this.

This is my code to make the text bold

bold=$(tput bold)
normal=$(tput sgr0)

echo "this is ${bold}bold${normal} but this isn't" > test.txt

cat test.txt | mailx -vvv -r "[email protected]" -S smtp="xx.xxx.xxx.xx" [email protected]

this is bold(in bold) but this isn't".

This as a mail notification.

Solution

  • If you add escape sequences (like produced by tput bold) into a text and send that via mailx or similar, the mail program might figure out that the text you send is not pure ASCII and deduce that this is probably a binary file.

    As a result, the file is sent as a binary part of the mail.