newaliases is not working

[PCHelper]

hello
i need your help.
the command newaliases is not responding, it looks like it is waiting for aditional parameters and not even running exim -bi will create the new aliases db.
what am i doing wrong?

 

[PCHelper]

/usr/sbin/exim -bi only gives me a new line.
aliases.db is not created.

 

[Chrysalis]

check over your alias files probably bad syntax somewhere.

 

[websafe]

I noticed the same problem on my DA servers today.

It's not an error in `/etc/aliases` because I was able to build my /etc/aliases with `newaliases` on a slackware + sendmail based machine.


After checking `man exim`:

-bi Sendmail interprets the -bi option as a request to
rebuild its alias file. Exim does not have the
concept of a single alias file, and so it cannot
mimic this behaviour. However, calls to
/usr/lib/sendmail with the -bi option tend to
appear in various scripts such as NIS make files,
so the option must be recognized.

If -bi is encountered, the command specified by
the bi_command configuration option is run, under
the uid and gid of the caller of Exim. If the -oA
option is used, its value is passed to the command
as an argument. The command set by bi_command may
not contain arguments. The command can use the
exim_dbmbuild utility, or some other means, to
rebuild alias files if this is required. If the
bi_command option is not set, calling Exim with
-bi is a no-op.

I found a working solution:

exim_dbmbuild /etc/aliases /etc/aliases.db

This is probably caused by a missing `bi_command` configuration option, which is `unset` by default

http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch-main_configuration.html