If you wish to send a file from a Linux or UNIX system, you can cat the file and pipe it into an email. For example, if you wish to send the contents of the /etc/hosts file in an email:

# cat /etc/hosts | mailx -s "subject goes here" your@email-address.com

This may not always be what you want, though. Sometimes, the file may be too large, or you may rather attach the file to an email.

To attach a file to an email, run it like this using -a option:

# echo "your message goes here" | \
mailx -s "your subject goes here" -a /etc/hosts your@email-address.com

Most email applications, like Microsoft Outlook, will put you text ("your message goes here") into the body of the email, and will attach /etc/hosts as a hosts.txt file for easy reading.

To attach larger files to an email (or for mail applications that handle zip files better as attachments), zip the file first before attaching it to an email message:

# zip /tmp/myzipfile.zip /etc/hosts
# echo "your message goes here" | \
mailx -s "your subject goes here" -a /tmp/myzipfile.zip your@email-address.com

If you found this useful, here's more on the same topic(s) in our blog:

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• Burning AIX ISO files on CD
• Using a proxy for wget
• Running bootp in debug mode to troubleshoot NIM booting
• Automatically accept new SSH keys