Re: uuencode is not working properly

[Bob Proulx]

Paturi, Sivakumar wrote:
> Basically I want to send a file from unix/linux to email through
> attachments. In my last company I used "uuencode" command to send
> the file through attachment.

Sure.  The uuencode/uudecode commands have been around for a very long
time.  They will definitely work.

> Now I want to do the same way , here instead of attaching this file
> , it is pasting the content in the email ( which was not readable ).

Right.  Becuase you put it in the contents of the email.  Your command was:

> uuencode power_numbers_dc.tcl power_numbers_dc.tcl | mail c_spatur

The uuencode processes the file and prints the result to standard
output.  That is piped to standard input of the mail program.  The
mail program read stdin and put that in the body of the message.
Basically it did exactly what you told it to do. :-)

If you want to uuencode a file and attach it then you would need to
attach the file.

  uuencode power_numbers_dc.tcl power_numbers_dc.tcl > power_numbers_dc.uu
  mutt -s power_numbers_dc -a power_numbers_dc.uu c_spatur </dev/null

But then you would need to uudecode it which is redundant.

> I am also looking the same way you explained. 

Another command that may work better (on Unix like systems) is the
shar and unshar commands.  Because you can pipe the email on the
receiving side through unshar.  But that needs utilities and your
MS-Windows system is very limited.

> How I get the unix/linux version , so that I will update you with
> proper version ,so that you can share the commands to send the file.

If you have no initial idea then use the uname command.

  uname -a

Strictly speaking that isn't best since it talks about the operating
system kernel and we don't care about the kernel but it will work
everywhere and we can figure it out from there.

Bob