cwwj@ur-tut (Clarence Wilkerson) (05/31/88)
How do I set up a .forward file to send incoming messages to as local file and to forward the messages to a remote machine.
ntm1458@dsacg3.UUCP (John Darby) (06/07/88)
My .forward file looks like this:
hostname\!myid
where hostname is where you want your mail forwarded and myid is the
id you use on that system. The \ is to escape the ! when you use csh.
On the dsacg1 system (the system that handles our news and mail, my
.forward file is dsacg3\!jdarby.
--
John T. Darby, (DLA Systems Automation Center, DSAC-TMM, P.O. Box 1605
Columbus, OH, ntm1458, 614 238-9174)
UUCP: {...cbosgd!osu-cis}!dsacg1!jdarby
Any opinions expressed are my own, not those of my employer.gandalf@csli.STANFORD.EDU (Juergen Wagner) (06/07/88)
In article <891@dsacg3.UUCP> ntm1458@dsacg3.UUCP (John Darby) writes: > > My .forward file looks like this: > hostname\!myid ...stuff deleted... >John T. Darby, (DLA Systems Automation Center, DSAC-TMM, P.O. Box 1605 Ok. That's fine. I believe, the original question was how to redirect incoming mail to both, a program and the mailbox. The above solution only forwards mail to another machine. A few comments on that: o The syntax user@host is preferrable and should be understandable for all mailers. o You should even keep a .forward on the machine you're reading your mail on because if you have a couple of machines hooked up over NFS, your home directory may always be the same (i.e. also your .forward). Say, you have machines "foo" and "bar" sharing the NFS file system on which your common home directory resides. Sending mail to either one will stay on that machine. Having a "global" .forward will forward it to one machine. You could, of course, also use a pipe to store incoming mail in a file accessible from both machines. o The .forward actually contains a list of paths to forward mail to. It contains a comma-separated list of addresses or pipes. Using a .forward gandalf@csli.stanford.edu, gandalf@portia.stanford.edu will NOT cause mail looping on csli because when sending mail on host X to user Y, addresses Y@X' where X' is a name for X, are simply ignored. o To prevent alias expansion, you can precede the address by a backslash. \gandalf will directly send it to user gandalf on the local machine, and will not try alias expansions. Other backslashes are not needed. I believe, they are properly treated, though. o To pipe something into a program, use the following syntax: "|/a/gandalf/getmail gandalf" where /a/gandalf/getmail might be a short script like #! /bin/csh touch /a/gandalf/post echo "" >> /a/gandalf/post echo "This is a message received on `date`." >> /a/gandalf/post cat >> /a/gandalf/post echo "--------end of message----------(to $1)" >> /a/gandalf/post exit 0 which collect all messages into a file /a/gandalf/post (quick and dirty). The message is read by reading standard input. That's something about mail. If anybody has further questions, please consult the man page "aliases, ...(4)" which describes all that in detail. Flames to /dev/null, please. -- Juergen "Gandalf" Wagner, gandalf@csli.stanford.edu Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford CA