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)