Sendmail, 3rd Edition

Name

_PATH...

Synopsis

Only a few pathnames are hardcoded into sendmail. The most obvious is its configuration file because that file lists the locations of nearly all other files. For various reasons a few other file locations are also hardcoded. Here, we describe those that you can change. Note that the general form for all such changes uses the confENVDEF declaration in your Build m4 file:

APPENDDEF(`confENVDEF', `-D_PATH...=\"/new/path/filename\"')

The new path must be surrounded by backslashed quotation marks so that the compiler will correctly interpret it as a string.

/etc/mail/sendmail.cf

The sendmail.cf file is pivotal to all of the sendmail program’s operations (Section 17.1). V8.7 sendmail recommends that it always be called sendmail.cf and always be located in the /etc directory. Beginning with V8.10, sendmail recommends that it always be located in the /etc/mail directory. For testing, debugging, or other legitimate reasons you might prefer to locate that file elsewhere (at least temporarily). You do that with the _PATH_SENDMAILCF definition:

APPENDDEF(`confENVDEF', `-D_PATH_SENDMAILCF=\"/src/tests/test.cf\"')

Beginning with V8.10 sendmail, the default location of the configuration file is the same for all versions of Unix, specifically /etc/mail/sendmail.cf. If you wish to revert to the original vendor location, you can define the USE_VENDOR_CF_PATH compile-time macro:

APPENDDEF(`confENVDEF', `-DUSE_VENDOR_CF_PATH')

This will cause sendmail to use the old location for its ...