One of the things which makes Linux more appealing is the capability to send email from command line, without logging to a webmail account or configuring your mail client like Outlook express. While working on the command line, you can send an attachment too, but the problem with this is file attachments like pdf or jpg appear as garbled text to the receiver. The solution? Another cool opensource software: uuencode. Download uuencode from this site for ubuntu: http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/i386/sharutils/download.

Usage: Suppose you want to send a pdf file(‘climatechange.pdf’) to a recipient address mrxyz@hisdomain.com. Then type the following command:

$uuencode climatechange.pdf climatechange.pdf | mails -s "climate change document" mrxyz@hisdomain.com

The pdf document wil appear as an attachment on the recipients side. Read More