grep "^$name" /etc/passwd > /dev/null && mail "$name"
- What does
>mean? - What is
mailgood for?
>Solution :
the ">" operator is what is known as a stream. With streams, you can redirect the output from stdin(or stdout and stderr). In this command, you get the name of the user current user, and then initialize the mail command with the current user as an argument, and sends the output of /etc/passwd excluding the current user (a list of all other users on the system) to the mail command aswell. The stream also redirects the output to /dev/null which simply discards the output, thus silencing it. "what mail is good for" is very unclear, and is fully dependent on your use case. Read more here: https://www.commandlinux.com/man-page/man1/mail.1.html