Hi All, Last night at a technical talk I lamented the loss around 5 years ago from Fedora of command-line tools to extract email attachments from a BASH script and a colleague told me Mutt can do this.
I installed Mutt, checked out the man pages, went through the documentation, spent an hour or more searching the archives and it is not at all readily apparent that Mutt can do this, or how. Just to be clear what my goals are: I'm trying to automate processing of inbound email for a particular job. I have the mail server (postfix) using the .forward ability to pipe to a script, which has the advantage of running as the owner of the script. The script dumps the mail into a particular directory - no other contents. It's just the one file. From there, I need to extract all the MIME parts / attachments, in order. Encoded parts need to be decoded - lots of images are expected, perhaps some HTML, etc. I fired up mutt on an example file and it opens it up just fine, the problem is having a user drive the user interface defeats the whole purpose; it must be done programatically. So, I've been looking into the various libraries that handle MIME - I understand Perl and Python both have good libraries, though I've been more interested in the Java one because there are some synergies there - but nevermind all that. My supposition is that if mutt can do it, the only way is to define a macro, as documented on this page: https://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/MuttFaq/Attachment (A brief but hopefully helpful digression is that I've spent a good bit of time in the documentation and other materials and apparently there's some tiny little assumption made about macros that is too obvious to the documentation writer to bother documenting but is unknwon to a newbie about how / where macros are defined. There's nothing in the man page, nothing on the on-screen help, and the documentation apparently assumes you already know how they're defined! The best help I found so far is the "(ab)use "macros" as variables" on the wiki under "ConfigTricks" - from that I can probably figure it out...) So.. that example was: macro attach W <save-entry><kill-line>/home/gawron/attachments/ macro attach E <save-entry><kill-line>/home/gawron/attachments/<enter> It's not clear why there are two bindings here, but anyway, this wouldn't work because a concurrent mail deilivery would have a race condition and screw up the processing but the script could cd into the directory first... So, maybe the macro would be: macro attach A <save-entry><kill-line>.<enter> ...I'm guessing... And I'd launch it like this: $ cd /dir/where/email/is $ echo A | mutt -f mailfile.name ...Am I on the right track? What do I expect in the directory? Any other guidance, please? Regards, Troi
