The Wrong Symbolic Link

When upgrading from the vendor’s version of sendmail to the open source version of sendmail, vendor assumptions about program locations might not agree with the new sendmail locations. One way to check for a mismatch is to look at the version of sendmail under each of its names. Consider, for example, a check to see whether sendmail and the newaliases program are the same:

% newaliases -d0.1 < /dev/null | head −1
Version 8.9.2
% /usr/lib/sendmail -d0.1 < /dev/null | head −1
Version 8.12.7

Here we find that newaliases is not a symbolic link to sendmail as we expected. Finding the cause of this mismatch can take some investigation. Under BSDI 3.x, for example, the /usr/sbin/newaliases program is a hard link, not a symbolic link, so replacing sendmail will not affect it.

Get sendmail, 4th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial