Xref: utzoo comp.mail.uucp:844 comp.unix.questions:4744 Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!acornrc!bob From: bob@acornrc.UUCP (Bob Weissman) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,comp.unix.questions Subject: 'Cannot mail directly to files' from sendmail Message-ID: <538@acornrc.UUCP> Date: 10 Dec 87 20:29:09 GMT Organization: Acorn Research Centre, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 23 Keywords: sendmail, 4.2bsd, help? All the documentation I can find says that you can mail to a file instead of a user's mailbox by using a recipient which {begins with, contains} a '/' character. (Docs differ on whether the recipient name has to begin with the '/', but this is immaterial here.) I know I can do this with /usr/ucb/mail. Fine. I want to do it (in a script) with /usr/lib/sendmail , but sendmail gives the error message 'Cannot mail directly to files'. The script is running as UUCP, driven by a "|script" entry in the aliases file. Looking at the code in recipient.c, it appears that sendmail is rather arbitrarily deciding it doesn't want to do what I want. (I am not claiming here that I understand all this code!) Any ideas (1) why sendmail is refusing me and (2) how to get around this? This is a Vax running 4.2bsd. Thanks, -- Bob Weissman Internet: bob@acornrc.UUCP UUCP: ...!{ ames | decwrl | oliveb | apple }!acornrc!bob Arpanet: bob%acornrc.UUCP@AMES.ARPA