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David
Asked: 2013-01-23 20:40:05 +0800 CST

Does "\root" do anything in /etc/aliases?

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I've found on a couple servers that have the following entry in /etc/aliases:

root: \root,[email protected]

You can send mail to /dev/null like this:

root: /dev/null

I can't find \root used in any documentation.

  1. Does \root do anything?
  2. Could it be a syntax error?
linux

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer
     but I can't find what the \ does

    The backslash "escapes" the token following, preventing further interpretation.

    It's an important mechanism in defining aliases like the example in your post, where "root" is aliased to include both the account of that name AND other addresses. Without the \ a loop would be created when the program interpreting the alias tried to dereference "root", which includes as a member "root" (which includes as a member "root", and so on..)

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  2. I believe that \root prevents that id from being passed through aliases again and (instead is) delivered to the LOCAL root account.

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  3. \root will save the message to (for example) /var/mail/root and forward it to [email protected]. Without it, only [email protected] will receive the message. The \user, other@address notation is very common for users that use ~/.forward files.

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  4. Putting a backslash (\) in front of the username in the first recipient is a special syntax for delivering mail to the local mail spool with no further aliasing.

    root: \root,[email protected]

    Here, user root is forwarding mails to two different places:

    1. One copy of the message goes to the mail spool
    2. The second recipient, [email protected], sends another copy of message to MX servers of example.com

    Please find details here.

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