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 userBREAKanything.
          When local is user, dash and ext are both empty.  When local
          is userBREAKanything, 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)