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)