Poke a Shell Variable with xTalk?

[david bovill]

My suggestion would be to go with the (text file + shelling to  
sendmail) combination,  and not the (shell + echo + pipe) combination  
to get variables into anything but the simplest stuff.

I have not done this with sendmail but looking at the man page, would  
indicate that you need to use the :

        Postfix sendmail relies on the postdrop(1) command to create
        a queue file in the maildrop directory.

Which you can find at:

         /var/spool/postfix, mail queue

However as this says use postdrop which in return takes input from  
STDIN you are back to square one.

        newaliases
               Initialize the alias database.  If no input  file  is   
specified
               (with  the  -oA  option,  see  below), the program  
processes the
               file(s) specified with the alias_database  
configuration  parame-
               ter.   If  no alias database type is specified, the  
program uses
               the type specified with the default_database_type   
configuration
               parameter.  This mode of operation is implemented by  
running the
               postalias(1) command.

Where:

       -oAalias_database
               Non-default  alias  database. Specify pathname or  
type:pathname.
               See postalias(1) for details.

So this is not looking simple:) The postalias command seems to be the  
thing you need to create the queue files in the maildrop directory  
(from files):

POSTALIAS(1)                                                       
POSTALIAS(1)

NAME
        postalias - Postfix alias database maintenance

SYNOPSIS
        postalias [-Nfinoprvw] [-c config_dir] [-d key] [-q key]
                [file_type:]file_name ...

So by issuing a series of simple commands passing the right fileNames  
you should get the result you want? NB ie use merge() to create the  
right shell commands...