View Source: aliases(5) - Waikato Linux Users Group

Edit PageHistory Diff Info LikePages

!!NAME
aliases - aliases file for sendmail

!!SYNOPSIS
__aliases__

!!DESCRIPTION
This file describes user  ID  aliases used by  sendmail. The file resides in  /etc/mail  and  is formatted as a series of lines of the form
;: name: addr_1, addr_2, addr_3, . . .

The ''name'' is the name to alias, and the ''addr_n'' are the aliases for that name.   ''addr_n'' can be another alias, a local username, a local filename, a command, an include file, or an external address.
;__Local Username__ : username
;: The username must be available via getpwnam(3).
;__Local Filename__ : /path/name
;: Messages are appended to the file specified by the full pathname (starting with a slash (/))
;__Command__ : |command
;: A command starts with a pipe symbol (|), it receives messages via standard input.
;__Include File__ : :include: /path/name
;: The aliases in pathname are added to the aliases for ''name.''
;__E-Mail Address__ : user@domain
;: An e-mail address in RFC 822 format.

Lines beginning with white space are continuation lines.   Another way to continue lines is by placing a backslash  directly before a newline.   Lines beginning with  #  are comments.

Aliasing occurs only on local names.   Loops can not occur, since no message will be sent to any person more than once.

After aliasing has been done, local and valid recipients who have a  ``.forward"  file in their home directory have messages forwarded to the  list of users defined in that file.

This is only the raw data file; the actual aliasing information is placed into a binary format in the file  /etc/mail/aliases.db using the program  newaliases(1).   A  newaliases command should be executed each time the aliases file is changed for the  change to take effect.

!!SEE  ALSO
newaliases(1),  dbm(3),  dbopen(3),  db_open(3),  sendmail(8), SENDMAIL Installation and Operation Guide, SENDMAIL An Internetwork Mail Router.

!!BUGS
If you have compiled  sendmail  with DBM support instead of NEWDB, you may have encountered problems in  dbm(3)  restricting a single alias to about 1000 bytes of information.   You can get longer aliases by "chaining"; that is, make the last name in  the alias be a dummy name which is a continuation alias.

!!HISTORY
The __aliases__ file format appeared in  4.0BSD.

11 pages link to aliases(5):

This page is a man page (or other imported legacy content). We are unable to automatically determine the license status of this page.

Last edited on Monday, November 24, 2003 6:19:53 pm by CraigBox

Edit PageHistory Diff Info LikePages