On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 03:58:07PM -0400, Gary Dale wrote: > I just spent about an hour with Google trying to fix a bash script that > worked last year. The problem was that it stopped sending attachments. > > In the course of my research I found that mail / mailx over the years has > used a variety of flags for attachments but now seems to have dropped the > capability entirely. At one point -a <filename> would attach a file. At > another, mailx adopted -A <filename> to do it. Lately neither program seems > to support attachments.
In jessie, we had bsd-mailx and heirloom-mailx. The latter had -a for attachments, and was awesome and perfect, and is clearly what you were using. For some reason, Debian "replaced" heirloom-mailx with s-nail in stretch, but they didn't *really* replace it. They left it half-done, with no mailx symlink, and no mail program either. Then, you could install bsd-mailx to get the old horrible mailx that doesn't do attachments, which is obviously what happened here. On <https://wiki.debian.org/NewInStretch> I suggest manually overriding the /etc/alternatives/mailx symlink to point to s-nail. If that has any drawbacks for people formerly using heirloom-mailx, I'm not aware of them. > Why did the mail / mailx developers drop support for attachments? I have no idea why they left it half-broken, but apparently <https://bugs.debian.org/846062> is a big part of the picture. I feel like the Debian maintainers were being pulled in multiple directions, with one arm being yanked by the bsd-mailx people and the other being yanked by the heirloom-mailx people. P.S. during the upgrade to wheezy, mutt's -a option changed, and now you have to use -- after the filename. But this seems to be an upstream change, not a Debian one. I guess upstream mutt devs thought it was more important to let someone do "-a *.txt" than to maintain backward compatibility. I've never used a wildcard to attach files to an email, so I'm not sure where that idea came from, but ... oh well, it's done.
