All (except for one RHEL4 box) of the servers I run use Debian. I have become accustomed to using the default mail client /usr/bin/mail that ships with the O/S for reading local email coming in from cron jobs.

Well, it turns out that this handy little tool doesn’t actually ship with a base Debian Etch install.

bash: mail: command not found

Grrrr!

Turns out you have to have mailutils installed to get /usr/bin/mail. I always forget this package name so I figured I’d post it here for easy access.

To install the necessary packages under Debian just issue the following command:

apt-get install mailutils

Enjoy the fresh maily goodness.