1.\" Copyright (c) 1998 Sendmail, Inc. All rights reserved. 2.\" Copyright (c) 1983, 1997 Eric P. Allman. All rights reserved. 3.\" Copyright (c) 1985, 1991, 1993 4.\" The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. 5.\" 6.\" By using this file, you agree to the terms and conditions set 7.\" forth in the LICENSE file which can be found at the top level of 8.\" the sendmail distribution. 9.\" 10.\" 11.\" @(#)aliases.5 8.8 (Berkeley) 5/19/1998 12.\" 13.Dd May 19, 1998 14.Dt ALIASES 5 15.Os BSD 4 16.Sh NAME 17.Nm aliases 18.Nd aliases file for sendmail 19.Sh SYNOPSIS 20.Nm aliases 21.Sh DESCRIPTION 22This file describes user 23.Tn ID 24aliases used by 25.Pa /usr/sbin/sendmail . 26The file resides in 27.Pa /etc 28and 29is formatted as a series of lines of the form 30.Bd -filled -offset indent 31name: name_1, name_2, name_3, . . . 32.Ed 33.Pp 34The 35.Em name 36is the name to alias, and the 37.Em name_n 38are the aliases for that name. 39Lines beginning with white space are continuation lines. 40Lines beginning with 41.Ql # 42are comments. 43.Pp 44Aliasing occurs only on local names. 45Loops can not occur, since no message will be sent to any person more than once. 46.Pp 47After aliasing has been done, local and valid recipients who have a 48.Dq Pa .forward 49file in their home directory have messages forwarded to the 50list of users defined in that file. 51.Pp 52This is only the raw data file; the actual aliasing information is 53placed into a binary format in the file 54.Pa /etc/aliases.db 55using the program 56.Xr newaliases 1 . 57A 58.Xr newaliases 59command should be executed each time the aliases file is changed for the 60change to take effect. 61.Sh SEE ALSO 62.Xr newaliases 1 , 63.Xr dbm 3 , 64.Xr dbopen 3 , 65.Xr sendmail 8 66.Rs 67.%T "SENDMAIL Installation and Operation Guide" 68.Re 69.Rs 70.%T "SENDMAIL An Internetwork Mail Router" 71.Re 72.Sh BUGS 73If you have compiled 74.Xr sendmail 75with DBM support instead of NEWDB, 76you may have encountered problems in 77.Xr dbm 3 78restricting a single alias to about 1000 bytes of information. 79You can get longer aliases by ``chaining''; that is, make the last name in 80the alias be a dummy name which is a continuation alias. 81.Sh HISTORY 82The 83.Nm 84file format appeared in 85.Bx 4.0 . 86