4BSD/usr/man/man5/aliases.5

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.TH ALIASES 5
.UC 4
.SH NAME
aliases \- aliases file for delivermail
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B /usr/lib/aliases
.SH DESCRIPTION
This file describes user id aliases
that will be used
by
.I /etc/delivermail.
It is formatted as a series of lines
of the form
.in +0.5i
name:addr1,addr2,...addrn
.in
The
.I name
is the name to alias,
and the
.I addri
are the addresses to send the message to.
Lines beginning with white space
are continuation lines.
Lines beginning with `\|#\|'
are comments.
.PP
Aliasing occurs only on local names.
Loops can not occur,
since no message will be sent to any person
more than once.
.PP
This is only the raw data file; the actual aliasing information is
placed into a binary format in the files
/usr/lib/aliases.dir
and
/usr/lib/aliases.pag
using the program
.IR newaliases (5).
A
.I newaliases
command should be executed each time the aliases file is changed for the
change to take effect.
.SH SEE\ ALSO
newaliases(1), dbm(3), delivermail(8)
.SH BUGS
Because of restrictions in
.IR dbm (3)
a single alias cannot contain more than about 1000 bytes of information.
You can get longer aliases by ``chaining''; i.e. make the last name in
the alias by a dummy name which is a continuation alias.