getting xargs and mail to play nicely

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, Peter King wrote:

> I want to do a (legitimate!) mailing of a single message to several
> recipients, and I'd like each to be the sole recipient specified in
> the email -- so no multiple addresses, cc, bcc, or suchlike. I have
> the recipients' addresses in a single text file, with one address per
> line in the file.
>
> How can I do a "mass mailing"?
>
> Why xargs, I thought, just grep through the address file and feed it
> to mail, and redirect the message:
>
>    % grep @ addressfile | xargs -n1 mail -s SUBJECT < messagefile
>
> But this doesn't work: mail tries to take addresses from messagefile,
> not from addressfile. If I leave off the messagefile, then I send nice
> cheerful null emails to each person listed in addressfile.

grep @ addressfile |
   while read addr
   do
         mail -s SUBJECT "$addr" < messagefile
   done

-- 
     Chris F.A. Johnson                     <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
     ==================================================================
     Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, 2005, Apress
     <http://www.torfree.net/~chris/books/cfaj/ssr.html>
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