Including additional alias files in Sendmail

Question

I've run into an issue with a piece of third party software that creates it's own alias file to be used by sendmail. Looking through the configuration options, google, and the man pages it seems like I can only define one alias file which means either I only get all the software's addresses or all of the local aliases.

I have tried appending my own entries to the software's alias file but it gets rebuilt everytime there is a change of addresses and my entries get blown away.

My question is, is there a way to define addional alias files in sendmail.mc or to include additional addresses from another file?

Answer 1

If you read the Sendmail documentation, you'll find:

ALIAS_FILE  [/etc/mail/aliases] The location of the text version of the
alias file(s). It can be a comma-separated list of names (but be sure you
quote values with commas in them -- for example, use define(`ALIAS_FILE',
`a,b') to get "a" and "b" both listed as alias files; otherwise the
define() primitive only sees "a").

So, you can edit your sendmail.mc file to use a common-delimited list of alias files, and then regenerate your sendmail.cf. And restart Sendmail.

Answer 2

You can't have a second aliases file, but you can include a file using the syntax

    :include: /path/name 

So define all your aliases in your aliases file, and then include the one created by your software.