NAME

       qmail-getpw - give addresses to users

SYNOPSIS

       qmail-getpw local

DESCRIPTION

       In qmail, each user controls a vast array of local addresses.  qmail-getpw finds the user that controls a
       particular address, local.  It prints six pieces of information, each terminated by NUL: user; uid;  gid;
       homedir;  dash;  and ext.  The user's account name is user; the user's uid and gid in decimal are uid and
       gid;  the  user's  home  directory  is  homedir;   and   messages   to   local   will   be   handled   by
       homedir/.qmaildashext.

       In case of trouble, qmail-getpw exits nonzero without printing anything.

       WARNING:  The  operating  system's getpwnam function, which is at the heart of qmail-getpw, is inherently
       unreliable: it fails to distinguish between temporary errors and nonexistent users.  Future  versions  of
       getpwnam should return ETXTBSY to indicate temporary errors and ESRCH to indicate nonexistent users.

RULES

       qmail-getpw  considers  an  account in /etc/passwd to be a user if (1) the account has a nonzero uid, (2)
       the account's home directory exists (and is visible to qmail-getpw), and (3) the account  owns  its  home
       directory.   qmail-getpw  ignores  account  names containing uppercase letters.  qmail-getpw also assumes
       that all account names are shorter than 32 characters.

       qmail-getpw gives each user control over the basic user address and  all  addresses  of  the  form  user-
       anything.   When  local  is  user,  dash  and ext are both empty.  When local is user-anything, dash is a
       hyphen and ext is anything.  user may appear in any combination of uppercase and lowercase letters at the
       front of local.

       A catch-all user, alias, controls all other addresses.  In this case ext is local and dash is a hyphen.

       You can override all of qmail-getpw's decisions with the qmail-users mechanism, which is reliable, highly
       configurable, and much faster than qmail-getpw.

SEE ALSO

       qmail-users(5), qmail-lspawn(8)

                                                                                                  qmail-getpw(8)