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.\" Copyright (c) 1998 Sendmail, Inc. All rights reserved.
.\" Copyright (c) 1983, 1997 Eric P. Allman. All rights reserved.
.\" Copyright (c) 1985, 1991, 1993
.\" The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
.\"
.\" By using this file, you agree to the terms and conditions set
.\" forth in the LICENSE file which can be found at the top level of
.\" the sendmail distribution.
.\"
.\"
.\" @(#)aliases.5 8.8 (Berkeley) 5/19/98
.\"
.Dd May 19, 1998
.Dt ALIASES 5
.Os BSD 4
.Sh NAME
.Nm aliases
.Nd aliases file for sendmail
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Nm aliases
.Sh DESCRIPTION
This file describes user
.Tn ID
aliases used by
.Pa /usr/sbin/sendmail .
The file resides in
.Pa /etc
and
is formatted as a series of lines of the form
.Bd -filled -offset indent
name: name_1, name2, name_3, . . .
.Ed
.Pp
The
.Em name
is the name to alias, and the
.Em name_n
are the aliases for that name.
Lines beginning with white space are continuation lines.
Lines beginning with
.Ql #
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
After aliasing has been done, local and valid recipients who have a
.Dq Pa .forward
file in their home directory have messages forwarded to the
list of users defined in that file.
.Pp
This is only the raw data file; the actual aliasing information is
placed into a binary format in the file
.Pa /etc/aliases.db
using the program
.Xr newaliases 1 .
A
.Xr newaliases
command should be executed each time the aliases file is changed for the
change to take effect.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr newaliases 1 ,
.Xr dbopen 3 ,
.Xr dbm 3 ,
.Xr sendmail 8
.Rs
.%T "SENDMAIL Installation and Operation Guide"
.Re
.Rs
.%T "SENDMAIL An Internetwork Mail Router"
.Re
.Sh BUGS
If you have compiled
.Xr sendmail
with DBM support instead of NEWDB,
you may have encountered problems in
.Xr 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.
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Nm
file format appeared in
.Bx 4.0 .
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