mkline - fold an alias file, paths file or mailing list into one-line records

/usr/lib/smail/mkline [ -ltn ] [ file ... ]

Mkline takes alias files, path files or mailing list files as input and produces output records containing one complete entry per line with all comments and whitespace replaced by zero or one spaces. One space is used if the concatenation of two tokens would otherwise cause ambiguity. For mailing lists, the -l flag should be specified and the output will be a list of addresses. Otherwise, the input is assumed to be alias files or path files and the output is single line entries, with the key always separated from the data by a single colon character (``:'').

If no input files are specified, the standard input is read. In addition, if a filename of - is given, the standard input is inserted at that point.

If the -t flag is specified, then an ASCII TAB character separates key from data, rather than a colon character.

If the -n flag is specified, then keys are not extracted from the input, so that all tokens pass through unchanged, with comments and whitespace still being reduced to the minimum required for unambiguous tokens.

The -t and -n flags have no effect when processing mailing lists.

If the file aliases contains:

Postmaster:	hustead		# Ted Hustead, jr.
UUCP-Postmasters:	tron, chongo	# namei contacts
	yamato	# kremvax contact
tron:	tron@namei.uucp (Ronald S. Karr)
yamato:	yamato@kremvax.ussr.comm (Yamato T. Yankelovich)
chongo:	chongo@eek.uts.amdahl.com (Landon Curt Noll)

then the command mkline aliases will produce:

Postmaster:hustead
UUCP-Postmasters:tron,chongo yamato
tron:tron@namei.uucp
yamato:yamato@kremvax.ussr.comm
chongo:chongo@eek.uts.amdahl.com

As an example of using mkline to compress mailing lists, consider the mailing list:

tron@namei.uucp,tron@uts.amdahl.com	# Ronald S. Karr
yamato@kremvax.ussr.comm	# Yamato T. Yankelovich
chongo@eek.uts.amdahl.com	# Landon Curt Noll
Wilt . (the Stilt) Chamberlain@NBA.US	# RFC822 doc example

The command mkline -l applied to this list will produce:

tron@namei.uucp
tron@uts.amdahl.com
yamato@kremvax.ussr.comm
chongo@eek.uts.amdahl.com
Wilt.Chamberlain@NBA.US

mksort(8), mkdbm(8), smail(5), smail(8), pathalias(8).

Copyright (C) 1987, 1988 Ronald S. Karr and Landon Curt Noll

Copyright (C) 1992 Ronald S. Karr

See a file COPYING, distributed with the source code, or type smail -bc, to view distribution rights and restrictions associated with this software.