uuencode doesn't work properly for attaching files with my below command

Question

I am trying to attach one file and send few echo messages in the Body of an email using mailx and uuencode. I have below command which I have added them together, and uuencode doesn't work properly but I get echo message properly in my email.

How can I make uuencode works here? Something wrong I am doing here I guess while combing uuencode with mailx?

(uuencode /tmp/chart.html percentage_graph.html) | mailx -s "LIP Data Quality Report for $DATE_YEST_FORMAT1" -r rj@host.com rj@host.com <<EOF
Data Successfully loaded into LIP_DATA_QUALITY table

Total Items Purchased: `echo $QUERY1 | awk '{print $1}'`

Total Items MissingorMismatch: `echo $QUERY1 | awk '{print $2}'`

Error Percentage: $QUERY2
EOF

But for testing purpose if I issue below command to see whether I am getting any html file or not in an attachment, then I get an email with the attachment properly.

(uuencode /tmp/chart.html percentage_graph.html) | mailx -s "LIP Data Quality Report for $DATE_YEST_FORMAT1" -r rj@host.com rj@host.com

Then what's wrong in my first command when I combine them together?

Answer 1

The mailx command can get its input from the pipe (uuencode) or the heredoc (<< EOF). But not both.

This may work for you:

$ mailx -s "LIP Data Quality Report for $DATE_YEST_FORMAT1" -r rj@example.com rj@example.com <<EOF
Data Successfully loaded into LIP_DATA_QUALITY table

Total Items Purchased: `echo $QUERY1 | awk '{print $1}'`

Total Items MissingorMismatch: `echo $QUERY1 | awk '{print $2}'`

Error Percentage: $QUERY2

$(uuencode /tmp/chart.html percentage_graph.html)

EOF

Alternately, consider using something like mutt which will let you attach files separately from the body of the message.

Answer 2

uuencode doesn't read stdin if you give it an input filename as you have done here. That's because it encodes a single file. if you want to encode two files, you need to combine them together somehow first. You could just use cat if concantenating them is ok:

cat /tmp/chart.html - | uuencode percentage_graph.html | mailx .... << EOF
..stuff to append to chart.html
EOF