SOLVED Using scripts to find root's email address

[Hazimil]

Hi All

Would appreciate some community feedback here. I have written (and shared) a few scripts for my FreeNAS server which the enduser needs to edit to update their email address, and I was looking at how I could remove this step, to make the scripts even easier to use.

I'm not sure about everyone else, but I send all reports (and script outputs) from my FreeNAS box to the email address used by root, and this email address is store in the file /etc/aliases. I have written the following snippet of code to extract the email address assigned to root:

Code:

grep -v '#' /etc/aliases | grep root: | cut -c 7-

Basically the code:

1. strip all lines with a # (i.e. comments)
2. looks for the line starting root:
3. cut the first 6 characters from that line
4. leaving an email address

I was wondering if anyone would be free to run this line of code on their box to confirm that it also correctly extracts their root's email address. Finally, I would appreciate an answer to the poll, to ascertain as to whether its worth my time doing this or not for my scripts.

Yours
Jonathan

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Why don't you just send the mail to "root" and let the configured alias do its magic? Hint: there can be more than one email address in any given alias ;)

HTH,
Patrick

 

[Hazimil]

Why don't you just send the mail to "root" and let the configured alias do its magic? Hint: there can be more than one email address in any given alias

Ahh, thanks. Didn't know could just send to 'root', I'll have to test that - and didn't know there could be more than one alias!

J.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Every local user account is also a valid unqualified email address. And what did you think that aliases file was for? ;)

Patrick

 

[Hazimil]

Well tested it and it worked sending an email to root. The more I do and learn, the more I find out I don't know!

Thanks for the feedback!

Jonathan