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12.1 The aliases(5) File | 461
The local must begin a line. It is an address in the form of a local recipient address
(we will discuss this in more detail soon). The colon follows the local on the same
line and can be preceded withspaces or tabs. If the colon is missing, sendmail prints
and syslog(3)s the following error message, and skips that alias line:
missing colon
The alias (to the right of the colon) is one or more addresses on the same line.
Indented continuation lines are permitted. Eachaddress should be separated from
the next by a comma and optional space characters. A typical alias looks like this:
root: jim, sysadmin@server,
gunther
?†‘
indenting whitespace
Here, root is the local address to be aliased. When mail is to be locally delivered to
root, it is looked up in the aliases(5) file. If found, root is replaced with the three
addresses shown earlier, and mail is instead delivered to those other three addresses.
This process of looking up and possibly aliasing local recipients is repeated for each
recipient until no more aliases are found in the aliases(5) file. That is, for example, if
one of the aliases for root is jim and if jim also exists to the left of a colon in the
aliases file, he too is replaced with his alias:
jim: jim@otherhost
The list of addresses to the right of the colon can be mail addresses (such as gunther
or jim@otherhost), the name of a program to run (such as /etc/relocated), the name of
a file onto which to append (such as /usr/share/archive), or the name of a file to read
for additional addresses (using :include:, which will be covered in the next chapter).
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