Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!mccall!tp
From: tp@mccall.uucp
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Smail, Aliases & Programs
Summary: Use a shell script
Message-ID: <1549.254492d7@mccall.uucp>
Date: 24 Oct 89 16:50:31 GMT
References: <590@piglet.vision.UUCP>
Organization: The McCall Pattern Co., Manhattan, KS, USA
Lines: 22

> What I need (!!), before we start running smail instead of a brain-damaged and
> hacked-around version of uumail, is a version of smail for Unix System V.3
> which *will* allow me to create aliases of the form
> 
> 	info-server	| /some/program/or/other

I've been on VMS for several years now, so I no longer have it lying
around, but what I did (using an earlier version of smail that didn't have
aliases at all) was rather than renaming smail to rmail and handing it the
mail directly, I wrote a shell script named rmail. It looked at its
parameter and checked it against an alias list. If it was found, it would
look to see if the first character of the alias was a pipe, and if so, exec
the appropriate program (remember the mail message itself is on stdin, so
execing the program would pass the message in to stdin of that program). I
also had it handling simple aliases and lists of aliases. If the alias
matched, but was not a pipe, it simply invoked smail with the alias names,
rather than the argument received. Finally, if the address is not an alias,
it simply exec'ed smail.
-- 
Terry Poot (800)255-2762, in Kansas (913)776-3683
The McCall Pattern Company, 615 McCall Rd., Manhattan, KS 66502, USA
UUCP: rutgers!ksuvax1!mccall!tp   Internet: tp%mccall@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu