automatically extract email attachments with common linux tools

I had need to automatically process emails to a specific address to pull attachments out, and this is how I did it:

$ yum install mpack

$ cat extract-attach.sh 
#!/bin/bash
rm -rf ~/attachtmp
mkdir ~/attachtmp
mv ~/Maildir/new/* ~/attachtmp
cd ~
munpack ~/attachtmp/*
rm -rf ~/attachtmp

$ crontab -l
*/5 * * * *	~/extract-attach.sh

Why, you may ask? Because I get a report a few times per day to the email address in question.

Note – this runs in my crontab every 5 minutes on a CentOS 6 x64 server; I’m sure the process is similar/identical on other distros, but I haven’t personally tried.