Re: aliases problem

[Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi>]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 04:34:36PM -0400, Peter Ip wrote:
> I'm trying to get vacation working in aliases in 2.99.56. I followed the
> instructions on the manpage and put in an entry like:
> 
> peter:	"\peter", "/usr/local/lib/mail/vacation peter"
> 
> The router returns:
> 
> error nosuchuser ter g0
> 
> If I leave out the backslash, I get
> 
> bitbucket 'duplicate-"peter"-aliases' peter g1
> 
> It works if the entry is in .forward.

Umm...   The back-slash processing is troublesome, to say the least..

It works with  .forward,  because  aliases.cf  treats its expansion
wrapping with "been here already, skip to next mechanism",  but with
aliases the treatment is: "been here already, we are looping!"

It stems also from thinking of:
   "user can do foolish things, sysadmin won't"
Perhaps the definition of "foolish" needs to be adjusted..


Testing the alias-expanded processing, I see that:

       dequote -- "\b-test"
       tmp='\-test'

which is ...  suboptimal.

The more I think of it, the more I think that there must not
be any backslash-stripping in the dequote processing, but
complimentarily there needs to be explicite leading backslash
stripper somewhere in the  aliases.cf's   routeuser()  code.

Err...   There is:


	a="$(dequote -- "$user")"

	ssift "$a" in
	\\(.*)	user="\1" # Back-quoted username -- most likely
		#didexpand=local
		;;
	...................
	tfiss

Converting that dequote-call to explicite patterns in ssift is
fairly easy, but ...  it is way too late tonight; must think more
of that latter in upcoming weekend..  (but at first, finnish
mid-summer rites are to be performed -- popular festivities
in this country..)

> TIA
> 
> Peter
> _____________________________________________________
> Peter Ip, PhD
> Computing and Network Services, University of Toronto
> email: peter.ip@utoronto.ca

-- 
/Matti Aarnio	<mea@nic.funet.fi>
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