Invoke a shell script in case mail with a specific subject is received

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello fellow forum members,

I have a script which returns a date (I can design the script to return the value in email), How can I design the script in AIX to invoke another shell script which performs some set of actions.

Procmail doesnt work in AIX.

2

create an alias with the pipe symbol as fhe first charracter, followed by thename of the script to execute. the email complete with headers will be the standard unput

3
4

Perhaps something like:-

# echo "user.email:   | /usr/libexec/mymailcheck.ksh" >> /etc/aliases
stopsrc -s postfix            # ... or whatever mail server you are using
startsrc -s postfix           # Ditto

Then a script like this as /usr/libexec/mymailcheck.ksh

#!/bin/ksh
while read line        # Read each line of the email input (including all headers and other stuff you normally never see)
do
   # Work out if we have a subject line and act on the subject
   linetag="${line%% *}"       # Get first word
   if [ "$linetag" = "Subject:" ]
   then
      subject="${line#Subject: }"
      logger "I have a subject \"$subject\""
      # Whatever else you want to do here too.......
   fi
done

Obviously do this on a test server and take a copy of /etc/aliases first.

Does that help at all?
Robin

5

I might be inclined to write it as:

IFS=":"
while read keyword data
do
if ["$keyword" = "Subject" ]
then
     if [ "$data" = "this is it" ]
      then
      do your stuff
      fi
fi
done

I would also retain the original email address in the alias file

my_email        my_email,|/usr/bin/myscript

Also you may have to run 'newaliases' to create an new hash table