Re: "Learning Perl" book, Chapter 1 example: open MAIL, "|mail email_address" doesn't work

[Bohdan Peter Rekshynskyj]

On Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 11:24 PM, Richard E.Adams wrote:

I am working through the exercises in Chapter 1 of Learning Perl, 
Second Edition, O'Reilly publishers.  I am using MacOS X (10.1.5), and 
Perl, v.5.6.0.  An excerpt from one of the author's programs shows the 
following three lines:

open MAIL, "|mail YOUR_ADDRESS_HERE";
print MAIL "bad news: $someone guessed $someguess\n";
close MAIL;
($someone and $someguess have been assigned appropriate values prior 
to the above three lines.)

I suspect the above works fine in a typical UNIX environment, e.g.,

open MAIL, "|mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]";
print MAIL "bad news: $someone guessed $someguess\n";
close MAIL;
How can I get the above to work on my Macintosh?  (I don't get an 
error message, nor do I receive an email.)  Any help would be greatly 
appreciated.
Try standard debugging techniques (also, sendmail should be active).
For example, if you'd try on the command line
mail YOUR_ADDRESS_HERE

You'd see right away it then prompts you for a subject!
Then you could start entering text - in effect you'd need two lines
of text, theoretically.  This could be obviated by using the -s option
and programming accordingly.  It also doesn't hurt to ALWAYS
program defensively, for example:
open (MAIL, "|mail YOUR_ADDRESS_HERE") || die ("Could not open mail\n");

(Note the use of parenthesis for both phrases.  Also, I use a 
subroutine instead of "die",
but this is ok for a quick example.)

Hope this helps!

				Bohdan

PS - using the command "mailq" will give you an idea of what's in your 
mail queue.

Richard E. Adams
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]