NAME

aliases − aliases file for sendmail

SYNOPSIS

/usr/lib/aliases
/usr/lib/aliases.dir
/usr/lib/aliases.pag

DESCRIPTION

These files describe user id aliases used by /usr/lib/sendmail. /usr/lib/aliases is formatted as a series of lines of the form

name: name_1, name2, name_3, . . . 

The name is the name to alias, and the name_n are the aliases for that name.  Lines beginning with white space are continuation lines.  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. 

/usr/lib/aliases is only the raw data file; the actual aliasing information is placed into a binary format in the files /usr/lib/aliases.dir and /usr/lib/aliases.pag using the program newaliases(8). A newaliases command should be executed each time that /usr/lib/aliases is changed for the change to take effect. 

Several kinds of name’s are special:

owner−mary: fred
any errors resulting from a mail to mary are directed to fred instead of back to the person who sent the message.  This is most useful when mary is a mailing list rather than an individual. 

beer: :include:/usr/cyndi/beer;
All colons and semicolons are required as shown.  The list of names in /usr/cyndi/beer is included in the name_n list for the beer alias, in addition to any other names in the name_n list.  This mechanism is for setting up a mailing list so that /usr/lib/aliases doesn’t have to be changed when people are added to or removed from the list.  The included file (that is, /usr/cyndi/beer in this case) may be changed at any time, and changes take effect immediately. 

SEE ALSO

newaliases(8), dbm(3X), sendmail(8)
SENDMAIL Installation and Operation Guide.
SENDMAIL An Internetwork Mail Router.

BUGS

Because of restrictions in dbm(3X) a single alias cannot contain more than 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.

Sun Release 2.0  —  Last change: 3 January 1984