NAME¶
vacation
—
return “I am not here” indication
SYNOPSIS¶
vacation |
-i
[-r
interval ] |
vacation |
[ -a
alias ]
[-c
ccaddr ]
[-d ]
[-f
db ]
[-m
msg ]
[-j ]
[-z ]
login |
DESCRIPTION¶
vacation
returns a message to the sender of a
message telling them that you are currently not reading your mail. The
intended use is in a
.forward file. For
example, your
.forward file might have:
\eric, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a allman eric"
which would send messages to you (assuming your login name was eric) and reply
to any messages for “eric” or “allman”.
Available options:
-a
alias
- Handle messages for alias in the same
manner as those received for the user's login name. Using
-a
alias multiple times is possible.
-c
ccaddr
- Copy the vacation messages to
ccaddr.
-d
- Print messages to stderr instead of syslog.
-f
db
- Uses db as the database file.
-m
msg
- Uses msg as the message file.
-j
- Reply to the message even if our address cannot be found in the
“To:” or “Cc:” headers. This option is very
dangerous and should be used with extreme care.
-z
- Set the envelope sender of the reply message to
“<>”.
-i
- Initialize the vacation database files. It should be used before you
modify your .forward file.
-r
- Set the reply interval to interval days.
The default is one week. An interval of “0” means that a
reply is sent to each message, and an interval of
“
infinite
” (actually, any
non-numeric character) will never send more than one reply. It should be
noted that intervals of “0
” are
quite dangerous, as it allows mailers to get into “I am on
vacation” loops.
-x
- Reads a list of addresses from standard input, one per line, and adds them
to the vacation database. Mail coming from these excluded addresses will
not get a reply. Whole domains can be excluded using the syntax
“@domain”.
-l
- Print the contents of the vacation database files. For each entry, the
address the reply has been sent to and the associated time will be printed
to standard output.
When started without arguments,
vacation
will
guide the user through the configuration process.
No message will be sent unless
login (or an
alias supplied using the
-a
option) is part of either the
“To:” or “Cc:” headers of the mail. No messages
from “???-REQUEST”, “Postmaster”,
“UUCP”, “MAILER”, or “MAILER-DAEMON”
will be replied to (where these strings are case insensitive) nor is a
notification sent if a “Precedence: bulk”, “Precedence:
list”, “Precedence: junk”, “X-Spam-Flag:
yes” or “Auto-submitted: (something other than no)” line
is included in the mail headers. The people who have sent you messages are
maintained as a
db(3) database in the file
.vacation.db in your home directory.
vacation
expects a file
.vacation.msg, in your home directory,
containing a message to be sent back to each sender. It should be an entire
message (including headers). For example, it might contain:
From: eric@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Eric Allman)
Subject: I am on vacation
Delivered-By-The-Graces-Of: The Vacation program
Precedence: bulk
I am on vacation until July 22. If you have something urgent,
please contact Keith Bostic <bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU>.
--eric
Any occurrence of the string
$SUBJECT
in
.vacation.msg will be replaced by the
subject of the message that triggered the
vacation
program.
vacation
reads the incoming message from
standard input, checking the message headers for either the
UNIX “From” line or a
“Return-Path” header to determine the sender. If both are
present the sender from the “Return-Path” header is used.
Sendmail(8) includes this “From”
line automatically.
Fatal errors, such as calling
vacation
with
incorrect arguments, or with non-existent
logins, are
logged on the standard error output and in the system log file, using
syslog(3).
DIAGNOSTICS¶
The
vacation
utility exits 0 on success, and
>0 if an error occurs.
FILES¶
- ~/.vacation.db
- database file
- ~/.vacation.msg
- message to send
- ~/.forward
-
SEE ALSO¶
aliases(5),
sendmail(8),
syslogd(8)
HISTORY¶
The
vacation
command appeared in
4.3BSD.
AUTHOR¶
vacation
was developed by Eric Allman and the
University of California, Berkeley in 1983.
This version is maintained by Marco d'Itri <md@linux.it> and contains code
taken from the three free BSD and some patches applied to a linux port.