Sendmail, 3rd Edition

Macro Expansion: $ and $&

The value of a macro can be used by putting a $ character in front of the macro’s name. For example, consider the following definition:

DXtext

Here, the macro named X is given text as its value.

If you later prefix a macro name with a $ character, you can use that value. This is called expanding a macro:

$X

Here, the expression $X tells sendmail to use the value stored in X (the text) rather than its name (X).

For multicharacter names, the process is the same, but the name is surrounded with curly braces:

D{Xxx}text     ← declare {Xxx} 
${Xxx}← use {Xxx}

Macro Expansion Is Recursive

When text contains other macros, those other macros are also expanded. This process is recursive and continues until all macros have been expanded. For example, consider the following:

DAxxx
DByyy
DC$A.$B
DD$C.zzz

Here, the text for the macro D is $C.zzz. When the D macro is defined, it is recursively expanded like this:

$D   → becomes →  $C.zzz
$C.zzz     → becomes →  $A.$B.zzz
$A.$B.zzz     → becomes →  xxx.$B.zzz
xxx.$B.zzz    → becomes →  xxx.yyy.zzz

Notice that when sendmail recursively expands a macro, it does so one macro at a time, always expanding the leftmost macro first.

In rules, when sendmail expands a macro, it also tokenizes it. For example, placing the earlier $D in the following rule’s LHS:

R$+ @ $D      $1

causes the LHS to contain seven tokens rather than three:

R$+ @ xxx . yyy . zzz          $1

Note that the largest a recursive expansion can grow is defined at compile time with the MACBUFSIZE compile-time ...