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/mail and is formatted as a series of lines of the form

name: name1, name2, name3,...

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 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.  Note that the NIS alias maps are generated by ypmake using the makemap program, which leaves aliases.pag and aliases.dir in the /etc/mail directory. 

SEE ALSO

newaliases(1M), sendmail(1M). 

HISTORY

The aliases file format appeared in 4.0BSD. 

Hewlett-Packard Company  —  HP-UX Release 10.20:  July 1996