VACATION(1) BSD General Commands Manual VACATION(1)NAMEvacation — return “I am not here” indication
SYNOPSISvacation-i [-r interval]
vacation-l
vacation-x
vacation [-a alias] [-d] [-f db] [-m msg] [-j] [-z] login
DESCRIPTIONvacation returns a message to the sender of a message telling them that
you are currently not reading your mail. The intended use is in a
.forward file. For example, your .forward file might have:
\eric, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a allman eric"
which would send messages to you (assuming your login name was eric) and
reply to any messages for “eric” or “allman”.
Available options:
-a alias
Handle messages for alias in the same manner as those received
for the user's login name.
-d Print messages to stderr instead of syslog.
-f db Uses db as the database file.
-m msg Uses msg as the message file.
-j Reply to the message even if our address cannot be found in the
“To:” or “Cc:” headers. This option is very dangerous and should
be used with extreme care.
-z Set the envelope sender of the reply message to “<>”.
-i Initialize the vacation database files. It should be used before
you modify your .forward file.
-r Set the reply interval to interval days. The default is one
week. An interval of “0” means that a reply is sent to each mes‐
sage, and an interval of “infinite” (actually, any non-numeric
character) will never send more than one reply. It should be
noted that intervals of “0” are quite dangerous, as it allows
mailers to get into “I am on vacation” loops.
-x Reads a list of addresses from standard input, one per line, and
adds them to the vacation database. Mail coming from these
excluded addresses will not get a reply. Whole domains can be
excluded using the syntax “@domain”.
-l Print the contents of the vacation database files. For each
entry, the address the reply has been sent to and the associated
time will be printed to standard output.
When started without arguments, vacation will guide the user through the
configuration process.
No message will be sent unless login (or an alias supplied using the -a
option) is part of either the “To:” or “Cc:” headers of the mail. No
messages from “???-REQUEST”, “Postmaster”, “UUCP”, “MAILER”, or
“MAILER-DAEMON” will be replied to (where these strings are case insensi‐
tive) nor is a notification sent if a “Precedence: bulk”, “Precedence:
list” or “Precedence: junk” line is included in the mail headers. The
people who have sent you messages are maintained as a db(3) database in
the file .vacation.db in your home directory.
vacation expects a file .vacation.msg, in your home directory, containing
a message to be sent back to each sender. It should be an entire message
(including headers). For example, it might contain:
From: eric@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Eric Allman)
Subject: I am on vacation
Delivered-By-The-Graces-Of: The Vacation program
Precedence: bulk
I am on vacation until July 22. If you have something urgent,
please contact Keith Bostic <bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU>.
--eric
Any occurrence of the string $SUBJECT in .vacation.msg will be replaced
by the subject of the message that triggered the vacation program.
vacation reads the incoming message from standard input, checking the
message headers for either the UNIX “From” line or a “Return-Path” header
to determine the sender. If both are present the sender from the
“Return-Path” header is used. Sendmail(8) includes this “From” line
automatically.
Fatal errors, such as calling vacation with incorrect arguments, or with
non-existent logins, are logged on the standard error output and in the
system log file, using syslog(3).
DIAGNOSTICS
The vacation utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
FILES
~/.vacation.db database file
~/.vacation.msg message to send
~/.forward
SEE ALSO
aliases(5,) sendmail(8), syslogd(8)HISTORY
The vacation command appeared in 4.3BSD.
AUTHORvacation was developed by Eric Allman and the University of California,
Berkeley in 1983.
This version is maintained by Marco d'Itri <md@linux.it> and contains
code taken from the three free BSD and some patches applied to a linux
port.
Linux June 15, 2003 Linux
