Mail addressed to support on a departmental server must be handed to a ticketing script, which expects to read the whole message on its standard input. Which entry in /etc/aliases arranges that?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 108. Essential system services medium
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How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct support: |/usr/local/bin/ticket.sh
Correct. A right-hand side beginning with a pipe symbol tells the local delivery agent to run the named program and write the message, headers and body, to its standard input.
Not correct support: /usr/local/bin/ticket.sh
Wrong, and it would quietly corrupt the script. A bare absolute path on the right-hand side means append the message to that file in mbox format, so the script itself would be overwritten with mail text.
Not correct support: :include:/usr/local/bin/ticket.sh
Wrong. The :include: form reads the named file expecting a list of recipient addresses, one per line, and delivers to each of them. It never executes anything.
Not correct support: "exec /usr/local/bin/ticket.sh"
Wrong. There is no exec keyword in the aliases format. A quoted string is treated as a single address token, so this would produce an unresolvable recipient and bounce.
Why
The right-hand side of an aliases entry is a comma-separated list whose members may each be a local user, a full address, an absolute path to a file to append to, a command prefixed with a pipe symbol, or an :include: reference. The leading pipe is the single character that turns a destination into program delivery. Because a program alias runs code, the delivery agent runs it as an unprivileged account rather than as root, and the file must be rebuilt into the aliases database before it takes effect.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page aliases(5)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 108 and space the ones you get wrong.
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