5

We are trying to get a list of unread emails from our Unix server using mailx -L. However, the email subject gets truncated if its length is greater than 25 characters.

How can this be resolved?

Raphael Ahrens
  • 9,771
user54930
  • 51

2 Answers2

2

mailx truncates its output to fit into the number of columns on stdout. To get the number of columns, it will try ioctl(1, TIOCGWINSZ, ...) first - your terminal's window size - and if that fails, it will use the COLUMNS environment variable. So try this:

COLUMNS=999 mailx -L | cat

The |cat is there so that mailx's stdout won't be a terminal, thus forcing the ioctl to fail.

Mark Plotnick
  • 25,413
  • 3
  • 64
  • 82
1

Mails usually are just text files (either in mbox or Maildir format), so you can process them with grep, sed, awk, or any scripting language. Common locations for mails are /var/mail, /var/spool/mail or some file/directory inside a users home directory.

To extract mail's subjects, you can use grep like this:

grep -E '^Subject: ' /path/to/mail

To remove the "Subject: " part, pipe it through sed:

... | sed -e 's/^Subject: //'

Filtering for unread message is more complicated, as the read/unread status is stored in a different mail header line. I guess you would need a slightly more complex script written in awk, Perl, Python etc. I have no tested solution ready for this.

f15h
  • 174