XALPARSE(8)

NAME
xalparse - parse an extended aliases file

SYNOPSIS
xalparse [-r[host]] [-t] xaliases aliases generics

DESCRIPTION
The xalparse program parses an extended aliases file and produceces an ordinary aliases file together with a file with generic address translations.

The format of the xaliases file is a superset of aliases(5):
    alias, alias, ...: prefix address, prefix address, ...
It differes by allowing more than one LHS alias and by adding an optional prefix in front of each RHS address. The prefix marks the address as either inbound or outbound according to the following table:
    (no mark)	Inbound
    <	Outbound
    >	Inbound
    <>	Both Inbound and Outbound

Inbound aliasing is the normal function implemented by aliases(5). All inbound entries are therefore simply copied to the aliases output file. Outbound addresses are written to the generics file in a format suitable for parsing by dbm (1). Each line will consist of the first LHS alias of the entry followed by the outbound addresses separated with spaces. The generics file is then normally loaded into a dbm(3) database that is read by sendmail(8) and used to substitute header sender addresses with the aliased name.

OPTIONS

-r  Route any non-local addresses on the LHS of an aliases entry (i.e. an address containing ANY of the ! or % or @ characters) through localhost or through the optionally specified host.

-t  Translate generics output into the format key (tab) value with the key mapped to lower case. In a NIS/YP setup, this allows the generics database to be built with a command something like:
    xalparse -t xaliases /dev/null - | makedbm - generics.map

AUTHOR
Lennart Lovstrand <lel@ida.liu.se>
CIS Dept, Univ of Linkoping, Sweden

SEE ALSO
dbm(1), aliases(5), sendmail(8)
Electronic Mail Addressing in Theory and Practice with The IDA Sendmail Enchancement Kit.