ALIASES(5)                  BSD Programmer's Manual                 ALIASES(5)

NAME
     aliases - aliases file for sendmail

SYNOPSIS
     aliases

DESCRIPTION
     This file describes user ID aliases used by /usr/sbin/sendmail. The file
     resides in /etc and 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 namen 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 mes-
     sage 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 files /etc/aliases.dir and /etc/aliases.pag
     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),  sendmail(8)

     SENDMAIL Installation and Operation Guide.

     SENDMAIL An Internetwork Mail Router.

BUGS
     Because of restrictions in dbm(3) a single alias cannot contain more than
     about 1000 bytes of information.  You can get longer aliases by ``chain-
     ing''; 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.

4th Berkeley Distribution       March 27, 1993                               1