source: trunk/third/sendmail/src/aliases.5 @ 12887

Revision 12887, 2.2 KB checked in by danw, 26 years ago (diff)
add in mdoc magic
Line 
1.\" Dummy comment to avoid confusing man
2.so /usr/athena/share/tmac/tmac.doc
3.\" Copyright (c) 1998 Sendmail, Inc.  All rights reserved.
4.\" Copyright (c) 1983, 1997 Eric P. Allman.  All rights reserved.
5.\" Copyright (c) 1985, 1991, 1993
6.\"     The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
7.\"
8.\" By using this file, you agree to the terms and conditions set
9.\" forth in the LICENSE file which can be found at the top level of
10.\" the sendmail distribution.
11.\"
12.\"
13.\"     @(#)aliases.5   8.8 (Berkeley) 5/19/1998
14.\"
15.Dd May 19, 1998
16.Dt ALIASES 5
17.Os BSD 4
18.Sh NAME
19.Nm aliases
20.Nd aliases file for sendmail
21.Sh SYNOPSIS
22.Nm aliases
23.Sh DESCRIPTION
24This file describes user
25.Tn ID
26aliases used by
27.Pa /usr/sbin/sendmail .
28The file resides in
29.Pa /etc
30and
31is formatted as a series of lines of the form
32.Bd -filled -offset indent
33name: name_1, name2, name_3, . . .
34.Ed
35.Pp
36The
37.Em name
38is the name to alias, and the
39.Em name_n
40are the aliases for that name.
41Lines beginning with white space are continuation lines.
42Lines beginning with
43.Ql #
44are comments.
45.Pp
46Aliasing occurs only on local names.
47Loops can not occur, since no message will be sent to any person more than once.
48.Pp
49After aliasing has been done, local and valid recipients who have a
50.Dq Pa .forward
51file in their home directory have messages forwarded to the
52list of users defined in that file.
53.Pp
54This is only the raw data file; the actual aliasing information is
55placed into a binary format in the file
56.Pa /etc/aliases.db
57using the program
58.Xr newaliases 1 .
59A
60.Xr newaliases
61command should be executed each time the aliases file is changed for the
62change to take effect.
63.Sh SEE  ALSO
64.Xr newaliases 1 ,
65.Xr dbopen 3 ,
66.Xr dbm 3 ,
67.Xr sendmail 8
68.Rs
69.%T "SENDMAIL Installation and Operation Guide"
70.Re
71.Rs
72.%T "SENDMAIL An Internetwork Mail Router"
73.Re
74.Sh BUGS
75If you have compiled
76.Xr sendmail
77with DBM support instead of NEWDB,
78you may have encountered problems in
79.Xr dbm 3
80restricting a single alias to about 1000 bytes of information.
81You can get longer aliases by ``chaining''; that is, make the last name in
82the alias be a dummy name which is a continuation alias.
83.Sh HISTORY
84The
85.Nm
86file format appeared in
87.Bx 4.0 .
Note: See TracBrowser for help on using the repository browser.