ALIASES(5)                386BSD 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 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.

     This is only the raw data file; the actual aliasing information is placed
     into a binary format in the file /etc/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.

SEE ALSO
     newaliases(1),  dbopen(3),  dbm(3),  sendmail(8)

     SENDMAIL Installation and Operation Guide.

     SENDMAIL An Internetwork Mail Router.

BUGS
     If you have compiled sendmail with DBM support instead of NEWDB, you may
     have encountered problems in dbm(3) restricting a single alias to 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.

HISTORY
     The aliases file format appeared in 4.0BSD.

4th Berkeley Distribution      December 11, 1993                             1