Linux Command - A Practical Reference

[[www.linux.com Linux.com]] has an article sending complex emails from the cmd line (or, scripts) using an alternative to mail: email. I don't know how well it works. Personally, I've just used mail directly in scripts.

In bash, I set up the fcn:

function msg {

# the -s switch in mail specifies that the 1st arg passed to it is the subject
# Alternatively, the email address could be specified as another fcn param
mail -s "${1}"  someone@example.com << EOM
${2}
EOM
}

which I use to notify me of errors and when calculations complete.