NEWALIASES(8)

💌 NEWALIASES(8) — the girlies' guide to the system manager's manual 💌

okay bestie, sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, because we're talking about newaliases from section 8 of the System Manager's Manual and honestly? it's giving tiny-but-mighty. no cap.

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✨ NAME ✨

newaliases — rebuild the data base for the sendmail aliases file 🦋

like. that's the whole job. that's the assignment. and she ate.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

newaliases

no flags. no arguments. no drama. she walks in, she does the thing, she leaves. main character energy fr fr 💅

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so here's the tea ☕ newaliases rebuilds the random access data base for the mail aliases file /etc/mail/aliases. that's the whole vibe.

and listen — you have to run it every single time that file changes or your edits just… don't take effect?? 😭 like you can type a whole beautiful aliases file and the system will simply not care. it's giving "i edited the doc but forgot to hit save." so run the command. every time. periodt.

newaliases is identical to sendmail -bi — same energy, different name, they're literally twins 👯‍♀️

the newaliases utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. so if you see a zero, we're slaying. if you see anything bigger than zero… bestie. something went wrong. 🙈

⚠️ Notice: do not use makemap to create the aliases data base!! because newaliases puts a special token into the data base that is required by sendmail. so if you skip her and go build it yourself with makemap, the token isn't there, and sendmail is gonna be like "where is it 💀". just use newaliases. trust. 🫶

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✨ FILES ✨

• /etc/mail/aliases — the mail aliases file 🌸

that's it. that's the file. she's the one. 👑

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• aliases(5)
• sendmail(8)

go read those too, iykyk 📚✨

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✨ HISTORY ✨

the newaliases command appeared in 4.0BSD. vintage. iconic. a true OG 💜

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this lil cutie is dated $Date: 2013-11-22 20:51:56 $, she lives in the System Manager's Manual, and she's been doing her one job since 4.0BSD. no notes. mwah 💋 🎀