NAME¶
vacation —
return “I am not
here” indication
SYNOPSIS¶
vacation |
-i [-r
interval] |
vacation |
[-a
alias]
[-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.
- -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” or
“Precedence: junk” 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.