Summary of support files

This topic supplies is a summary of the support files that sendmail(1M) creates or generates. Many of these can be changed by editing the sendmail.cf file; check there to find the actual pathnames.

/usr/lib/sendmail

The binary of sendmail.

/etc/mail/newaliases

A link to /usr/lib/sendmail; causes the alias database to be rebuilt. Running this program is completely equivalent to giving sendmail the -bi flag.

/etc/mail/mailq

Prints a listing of the mail queue. This program is equivalent to using the -bp flag to sendmail.

/etc/sendmail.cf

The configuration file, in textual form.

/etc/mail/mailq

The SMTP help file.

/etc/mail/sendmail.st

A statistics file; need not be present.

/etc/sendmail.pid

Created in daemon mode; it contains the process ID of the current SMTP daemon. If you use this in scripts; use head -1 to get just the first line; the second line contains the command line used to invoke the daemon, and later versions of sendmail may add more information to subsequent lines.

/etc/mail/aliases

The textual version of the alias file.

/etc/mail/aliases.{pag,dir}

The alias file in ndbm(3bsd) format.

/var/spool/mqueue

The directory in which the mail queue and temporary files reside.

/var/spool/mqueue/qf*

Control (queue) files for messages.

/var/spool/mqueue/df*

Data files.

/var/spool/mqueue/tf*

Temporary versions of the qf files, used during queue file rebuild.

/var/spool/mqueue/xf*

A transcript of the current session.