Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!think!barmar
From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Checking aliases file
Message-ID: <22824@news.Think.COM>
Date: 23 Jun 89 20:57:20 GMT
Sender: news@Think.COM
Reply-To: barmar@think.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 22

Does anyone have a routine that will check a mail aliases file (as
used by sendmail), looking for common syntax errors?  In particular,
people here often forget to put a comma after a name when adding to
the end of a line, i.e. if the mailing list originally looked like

my-list:  frank, ernie,
	  /archives/my-list

when bert adds himself he might write

my-list:  frank, ernie, bert
	  /archives/my-list

which gets parsed by sendmail as the address "bert /archives/my-list".
If you've got something that will detect these missing commas, we'd
really appreciate it.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar