HP-UX Reference (11i v1 00/12) - 5 Miscellaneous Topics, 7 Device (Special) Files, 9 General Information, Index (vol 9)

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aliases(5) aliases(5)

NAME

aliases - aliases ﬁle for sendmail

SYNOPSIS

/etc/mail/aliases

DESCRIPTION

The newaliases command (which is the same as sendmail -bi; see sendmail(1M)) builds the send-

mail alias database from a text ﬁle. The default text ﬁle is /etc/mail/aliases. Local addresses

(local user names) are looked up in the alias database and expanded as necessary, unless the user name is

preceded by a backslash (\). When the aliases ﬁle contains multiple entries for a given alias, only the last

entry is used. Except when the m processing option (the send to me option) is set in the sendmail com-

mand or in the conﬁguration ﬁle, /etc/mail/sendmail.cf, the sender is not included in any alias

expansions. For example, if joe sends a message to group, and the expansion of group includes joe,

the message is not delivered to joe.

Each line of the alias text ﬁle must be of the form:

alias : mailing-list

Mailing lists can be continued onto multiple lines. Each continuation line must begin with white space.

Lines beginning with # are comments.

A mailing-list is a comma-separated list of one or more of the following:

user-name Local user names occurring in alias expansions will themselves be looked

up in the alias databaseunless they are preceded by backslash (\).

remote-address The remote address syntax understood by sendmail is conﬁgured in the

sendmail conﬁguration ﬁle, and typically includes the RFC-822-style

user

@domain and the UUCP-style host!user.

filename This must be an absolute path name. sendmail appends a message to

the ﬁle only if the directory in which it resides is readable and searchable

by all, and only if the ﬁle already exists, is not executable, and is writable

by all.

| command-line sendmail pipes the message as standard input to the speciﬁed command.

If command-line contains blanks, it must be enclosed in quotation marks

("). For example,

msgs: "|/usr/bin/msgs -s"

:include:

filename sendmail reads ﬁlename for a list of recipient addresses and forwards

the message to each. For example, an alias such as:

poets: ":include:/usr/local/lib/poets.list"

would read /usr/local/lib/poets.list for the list of addresses

making up the group.

If a ﬁle named .forward exists in a user’s home directory and is owned by the user, sendmail

redirects mail for that user to the list of addresses in the .forward ﬁle.

An address in a .forward or :include: ﬁle can be anything that can appear as a mailing-list in the

alias text ﬁle.

sendmail can run programs or write to ﬁles using .forward ﬁle. This is controlled by the

/etc/shells ﬁle. If the owner of the .forward ﬁle lacks a valid shell as listed in

/etc/shells

ﬁle, the execution of such programs will be disallowed. The user can still execute such programs by placing

the special string

/SENDMAIL/ANY/SHELL/ in the /etc/shells ﬁle.

The alias database is examined before a recipient’s

.forward ﬁle is examined. After aliasing has been

done, local and valid recipients who have a .forward ﬁle in their home directory will have messages for-

warded to the list of users deﬁned in that ﬁle.

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

than once.

Aliases deﬁned in /etc/mail/aliases

will NOT be expanded in headers from mailx (see mailx(1)),

but WILL be visible over networks and in headers from

rmail. (see mail(1)).

Section 5−−20 − 1 − HP-UX Release 11i: December 2000

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