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Sendmail, 3rd Edition
book

Sendmail, 3rd Edition

by Bryan Costales
December 2002
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1232 pages
56h 38m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Sendmail, 3rd Edition

Basic Modes of sendmail

Besides the daemon mode (discussed earlier), sendmail can be run in a number of other useful modes. In this section we’ll have a look at some of these. Others we’ll leave for later.

How to Run sendmail

One way to run sendmail is to provide it with the name of a recipient as the only command-line argument. For example, the following sends a mail message to george:

% /usr/lib/sendmail george

Multiple recipients can also be given. For example, the following sends a mail message to george, truman, and teddy:

% /usr/lib/sendmail george,truman,teddy

The sendmail program accepts two different kinds of command-line arguments. Arguments that do not begin with a - character (such as george) are assumed to be recipients. Arguments that do begin with a - character are taken as switches that determine the behavior of sendmail. The recipients must always follow all the switched arguments. Any switched arguments that follow recipients will be interpreted as recipient addresses, potentially causing bounced mail.

In this chapter we will cover only a few of these switch-style command-line arguments (see Table 1-1). The complete list of command-line switches, along with an explanation of each, is presented in Chapter 15.

Table 1-1. Some command-line switches

Flag

Description

-b

Set operating mode

-v

Run in verbose mode

-d

Run in debugging mode

Become a mode (-b)

The sendmail program can function in a number of different ways depending on which form of -b argument you ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565928393Errata Page