A week (?) ago I asked for help. I was attempting to send mail w/ attachments from a bash script to be run by crond, in order to email a user .tar.gz files files so that, in the event of a crash, we had copies of the files other than the local backups. I got a lot of 'man mail' as response. The problem with 'mail' is that it didn't deal directly with attachments, but I got around that. The really big problem with 'mail' is that it wanted me to Ctrl-D my way out, which I was having problems doing from a script that wasn't supposed to be interactive. I simplified the more difficult part and borrowed a pre-written script that would take file-names as arguments and automatically run all the requested encoding. (You can find it at http://home.clara.net/dwotton/unix/mail_files.txt) However, I was still getting trapped in a mailer that wanted me to Ctrl-D out. I learned a neat little trick this weekend - echo $'x04' ... It took awhile to find a file that specifically mentioned that you can, in fact, force in such things as Ctrl-D (the ASCII EOT character, 0x04 hexadecimal) without being around to type Ctrl-D. Almost every file I came across had ^D, and then said you had to type that in yourself... That's not true. It is incredibly easy to do, once you figure out how. Not mentioned anywhere, though, that I could find - emailing attachments without interaction. It's certainly not mentioned in 'man mail'... ~ald