On Fri, Jul 07, 2017 at 09:41:33AM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote: > On 2017-07-07 02:06 -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote: > > What was the reason for omitting mailutils (and, specifically, a > > functional /usr/bin/mail binary) from the default strech install? > > For the record, mailutils have never been part of a default install, but > bsd-mailx (which also provides /usr/bin/mail) was until Jessie.
I stand corrected. bsd-mailx does sound more familiar, now that you mention it, but mailutils was the (first) `mail`-providing package I found when I started looking with `apt-cache search`. > > That's kind of a standard thing to be there on *nix systems... > > For better or worse, a default Debian installation seems to not omit > various programs that have been standard on Unix systems. Yes, exactly, which is why I was so surprised by /usr/bin/mail's disappearance. > There are certainly reasons for that, and I don't think many people > use /usr/bin/mail to send or read mail these days. <snip> > Packages using /usr/bin/mail to send reports should depend on, or at > least recommend, bsd-mailx | mailx. The reports in question weren't from packaged reporting tools, but rather from random command-line programs being run with a command of the form `some-program 2&>1 | mail dave -s "some-program results"`. Is there a more "modern"/preferred way of doing this sort of thing, which will work in a default stretch install (and doesn't require adding headers to the program output to make it suitable for piping directly to /usr/sbin/sendmail)? Before someone points out that cron mails output to the user whose crontab it runs from, these commands aren't being run directly from a crontab. Most are in cron.(d/daily/weekly/monthly), which doesn't appear to support mailing the output to a non-root user or customizing the subject line into somthing more useful than "Cron <root@host> test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )". -- Dave Sherohman