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From: john@jetson.UPMA.MD.US (John Owens)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: foo   .bar.com(LOCAL) in pathalias.
Message-ID: <163@jetson.UPMA.MD.US>
Date: 20 Oct 88 01:47:36 GMT
References: <211@obie.UUCP> <292@lakart.UUCP>
Organization: SMART HOUSE Limited Partnership
Lines: 51

In article <292@lakart.UUCP>, dg@lakart.UUCP (David Goodenough) writes:
> Yet another (IMHO "elegant") solution is to take advantage of the fact that
> pathalias utilises data IN THE ORDER IT FINDS IT with respect to multiple

Actually, pathalias uses the lowest cost it encounters as the cost of
the link.  That's why you can't increase the cost of a link just by
saying "foo bar(DEAD)", and why the "dead {foo!bar}" syntax was
introduced.  To demonstrate:

% cat one
# public
foo	bar(5000)
foo	other(1000)
other	bar(1000)
# private
foo	bar(100)

% cat one | pathalias -l foo
foo	%s
bar	bar!%s
other	other!%s
% cat two
# private
foo	bar(100)
# public
foo	bar(5000)
foo	other(1000)
other	bar(1000)

% cat two | pathalias -l foo
foo	%s
other	other!%s
bar	bar!%s
% 

It doesn't matter in which order pathalias sees the "foo bar(5000)"
line; it will always use the "foo bar(100)" line.

Regardless, I agree that it is an elegant and good idea to have a
local input file to pathalias that contains reduced costs that aren't
published publically.  I've used that technique on every system I've
run pathalias on.  I just want to make sure that no one tries to use
the technique to attempt to _increase_ locally the cost of a published
link.

Happy pathaliasing,
	-John

-- 
John Owens		john@jetson.UPMA.MD.US		uunet!jetson!john
+1 301 249 6000		john%jetson.uucp@uunet.uu.net