On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, John Jetmore wrote:
> I found out we have an established customer with an email address that
> starts with a pound sign. This is an established address, so we can't
> just tell them they can't have it. My problem is that exim_dbmbuild skips
> all lines that start with pound.
(You are lucky that I am bilingual, and understand that a North
American's "pound" is the # character. :-) This side of the pond,
"pound sign" is something different.)
You have just discovered a bug in exim_dbmbuild! If you RTFM, you find this:
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46.8 Making DBM files (exim_dbmbuild)
The "exim_dbmbuild" program reads an input file containing keys and data in
the format used by the lsearch lookup (see section 9.2).
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and if you read 9.2, you find:
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. lsearch: The given file is a text file that is searched linearly for a
line beginning with the key, terminated by a colon or white space or the
end of the line. The first occurrence that is found in the file is used.
White space between the key and the colon is permitted. The remainder of
the line, with leading and trailing white space removed, is the data.
This can be continued onto subsequent lines by starting them with any
amount of white space, but only a single space character is included in
the data at such a junction. If the data begins with a colon, the key
must be terminated by a colon, for example:
baduser: :fail:
Empty lines and lines beginning with # are ignored, even if they occur in
the middle of an item. This is the traditional textual format of alias
files. Note that the keys in an lsearch file are literal strings. There
is no wildcarding of any kind.
In most lsearch files, keys are not required to contain colons and
whitespace. However, if you need this feature, it is available. If a key
begins with a doublequote character, it is terminated only by a matching
quote (or end of line), and the normal escaping rules apply to its
contents (see section 6.12). An optional colon is permitted after quoted
keys (exactly as for unquoted keys). There is no special handling of
quotes for the data part of an lsearch line.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Note the final paragraph. I guess it should say "# characters" as well
as "colons and white space".
Unfortunately, though this stuff about quotes applies to Exim itself,
when processing lsearch files, it appears that I never updated dbmbuild
to handle quoted keys. I have noted the bug, and it will doubtless get
fixed in due course. If you fix it yourself, please send the patch.
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
Get the Exim 4 book: http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book
