NAME
          qmail-getpw - give addresses to users

     SYNOPSIS
          qmail-getpw local

     DESCRIPTION
          In qmail, each user controls a vast array of local
          addresses.  qmail-getpw finds the user that controls a
          particular address, local.  It prints six pieces of
          information, each terminated by NUL:  user; uid; gid;
          homedir; dash; and ext.  The user's account name is user;
          the user's uid and gid in decimal are uid and gid; the
          user's home directory is homedir; and messages to local will
          be handled by homedir/.qmaildashext.

          In case of trouble, qmail-getpw exits nonzero without
          printing anything.

          WARNING: The operating system's getpwnam function, which is
          at the heart of qmail-getpw, is inherently unreliable:  it
          fails to distinguish between temporary errors and
          nonexistent users.  Future versions of getpwnam should
          return ETXTBSY to indicate temporary errors and ESRCH to
          indicate nonexistent users.

     RULES
          qmail-getpw considers an account in /etc/passwd to be a user
          if (1) the account has a nonzero uid, (2) the account's home
          directory exists (and is visible to qmail-getpw), and (3)
          the account owns its home directory.  qmail-getpw ignores
          account names containing uppercase letters.  qmail-getpw
          also assumes that all account names are shorter than 32
          characters.

          qmail-getpw gives each user control over the basic user
          address and all addresses of the form user-anything.  When
          local is user, dash and ext are both empty.  When local is
          user-anything, dash is a hyphen and ext is anything.  user
          may appear in any combination of uppercase and lowercase
          letters at the front of local.

          A catch-all user, alias, controls all other addresses.  In
          this case ext is local and dash is a hyphen.

          You can override all of qmail-getpw's decisions with the
          qmail-users mechanism, which is reliable, highly
          configurable, and much faster than qmail-getpw.

     SEE ALSO
          qmail-users(5), qmail-lspawn(8)