Sendmail Operation Guide

Summary of support files

This topic supplies is a summary of the support files that sendmail(1M) creates or generates. Many of these can be changed by editing the sendmail.cf file; check there to find the actual pathnames.


/usr/lib/sendmail
The binary of sendmail.

/etc/mail/newaliases
A link to /usr/lib/sendmail; causes the alias database to be rebuilt. Running this program is completely equivalent to giving sendmail the -bi flag.

/etc/mail/mailq
Prints a listing of the mail queue. This program is equivalent to using the -bp flag to sendmail.

/etc/sendmail.cf
The configuration file, in textual form.

/etc/mail/mailq
The SMTP help file.

/etc/mail/sendmail.st
A statistics file; need not be present.

/etc/sendmail.pid
Created in daemon mode; it contains the process ID of the current SMTP daemon. If you use this in scripts; use head -1 to get just the first line; the second line contains the command line used to invoke the daemon, and later versions of sendmail may add more information to subsequent lines.

/etc/aliases
The textual version of the alias file.

/etc/aliases.{pag,dir}
The alias file in ndbm(3bsd) format.

/var/spool/mqueue
The directory in which the mail queue(s) and temporary files reside.

/var/spool/mqueue/qf*
Control (queue) files for messages.

/var/spool/mqueue/df*
Data files.

/var/spool/mqueue/tf*
Temporary versions of the qf files, used during queue file rebuild.

/var/spool/mqueue/xf*
A transcript of the current session.
=========================== === COMLINE FLAGS --- The envelope sender address is set to This address may also be used in the From: header if that header is missing during initial submission. The envelope sender address is used as the recipient for delivery status notifications and may also appear in a Return-Path: header. When accepting messages via the command line, indicate that they are for relay (gateway) submission. sendmail may complain about syntactically invalid messages, e.g., unqualified host names, rather than fixing them when this flag is set. sendmail will not do any canonicalization in this mode. === What information you want returned if the message bounces; can be for headers only or for headers plus body. This is a request only; the other end is not required to honor the parameter. If is specified local bounces also return only the headers. === end of section --- The DSN related options and have no effects on running as daemon.
© 2000 The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. All rights reserved.