Emailed output of 'cat' removes random spaces and newlines

Question

First time posting here.
I have the following file and contents:

linux$ cat file.txt    
line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4

I have the following code:

Output=$(cat file.txt)
echo "$Output" | mail -s "[Test]" -a test.txt host@domain.com

I send the file itself as attachment for debugging purpose. The problem I encounter is that the email body containing the output of 'cat file.txt' looks like this:

line 1
line 2 line
3 line 4

The attached file contains a correctly formatted output of 'cat file.txt', no characters, newlines, spaces are added or removed.

What might be causing this? Appreciate your help!

Do you have the same problem if you read from `file.txt` directly? I.e., `mail -s "[Test]" -a test.txt host@domain.com < file.txt` — chepner, Jan 27 '16 at 15:54
What are you using to read the email? Some email programs like Outlook have an option to "Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages" which can mess with formatting. — Mr. Llama, Jan 27 '16 at 16:09

score -1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

I would think you probably need to specify in which format your email content should be sending out.

UTF-8 is great option since it's world wide almost.

This might be helpful:

cat file.txt | mail -s '$(echo -e "Test\nContent-Type: text/html")' -a test.txt host@domain.com

or with charset

cat file.txt | mail -s '$(echo -e "Test\nContent-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii")' -a test.txt host@domain.com

or without UNIX pipeline

mail -a 'Content-type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"' foo@bar.com < file.txt

More info can be found here.

It really depends on what version of your mail.

Hope this could be helpful

Thanks a lot dotslash, that helped a lot! Appreciate it – Spitfire86 Jan 28 '16 at 13:50 — Spitfire86, Jan 28 '16 at 13:50

Emailed output of 'cat' removes random spaces and newlines

1 Answers1