Shell – What are some better options for encoding email attachments than uuencode in a bash script

You need mimencode from the metamail package... Debian has some package info, but the package is based on ancient Bellcore code.

If you're just trying to send mail though, you might look into using mutt; I think it can mimencode attachments from the commandline.

I had the following bit of perl that strips all attachments from stdin and returns stdout which may be of help:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict; 

use Mail::Audit; 
use Mail::Audit::Attach qw(Attach); 

my $mail = Mail::Audit->new; 

my $attachments = $mail->attachments; 

foreach (@$attachments) 
{ 
      $_->remove; 
} 
$mail->print();

and than a simple loop over the files in your Maildir you want stripped of attachments for isntance:

for filename in <list> 
do 
  ./strip.pl < "$filename" > "$filename".lock && mv "$filename".lock "$filename" 
  rm "$filename".lock
done 

An interesting modification could be to first extract the attachments and store them separately first before deleting them from the mails:

foreach (@$attachments) 
{ 
      $_->save("/path/to/attachment/dir");
      $_->remove; 
}

Make a back-up first though ;)