MAN PAGES FOR QMAIL 1.03

NAME

     qmail-getpw - give addresses to users

SYNOPSIS

     qmail-getpw local

DESCRIPTION

     In  qmail,  each  user  controls  a  vast  array  of   local
     addresses.   qmail-getpw finds the user that controls a par-
     ticular address, local.  It prints six  pieces  of  informa-
     tion,  each  terminated  by  NUL:   user; uid; gid; homedir;
     dash; and ext.  The user's account name is user; the  user's
     uid  and  gid  in  decimal  are uid and gid; the user's home
     directory is homedir; and messages to local will be  handled
     by homedir/.qmaildashext.

     In case of trouble, qmail-getpw exits nonzero without print-
     ing anything.

     WARNING: The operating system's getpwnam function, which  is
     at  the  heart of qmail-getpw, is inherently unreliable:  it
     fails to distinguish between  temporary  errors  and  nonex-
     istent  users.   Future  versions  of getpwnam should return
     ETXTBSY to indicate temporary errors and ESRCH  to  indicate
     nonexistent users.

RULES

     qmail-getpw considers an account in /etc/passwd to be a user
     if (1) the account has a nonzero uid, (2) the account's home
     directory exists (and is visible to  qmail-getpw),  and  (3)
     the  account  owns  its home directory.  qmail-getpw ignores
     account names  containing  uppercase  letters.   qmail-getpw
     also  assumes  that  all  account  names are shorter than 32
     characters.

     qmail-getpw gives each user  control  over  the  basic  user
     address  and  all  addresses  of the form userBREAKanything.
     When local is user, dash and ext are both empty.  When local
     is  userBREAKanything, dash is a hyphen and ext is anything.
     user may appear in any combination of uppercase  and  lower-
     case letters at the front of local.

     A catch-all user, alias, controls all other  addresses.   In
     this case ext is local and dash is a hyphen.

     You can override all of  qmail-getpw's  decisions  with  the
     qmail-users  mechanism,  which is reliable, highly configur-
     able, and much faster than qmail-getpw.

SEE ALSO

     qmail-users(5), qmail-lspawn(8)