Quickie script to update mailman aliases

We run sendmail as our MTA and mailman as our list management solution. This is a script that we use to manage updates for mailman aliases. It leverages the built-in mailman command "genaliases" which will regenerate sendmail-style aliases for all of the lists on the system.

    #!/bin/bash
    
    #############################################
    # local script written to auto-update
    # the aliases.mailman file with new list aliases
    #
    #############################################
    
    /usr/local/mailman/bin/genaliases >/tmp/aliases.mailman
    sed -e "1,4d" </tmp/aliases.mailman >/tmp/aliases.mailman2
    mv -f /etc/aliases.mailman /etc/aliases.mailman.bak
    cp -f /tmp/aliases.mailman2 /etc/aliases.mailman
    rm -f /tmp/aliases.mailman*
    newaliases

As you can see from the script, all mailman list aliases are stored in the file /etc/aliases.mailman. To make this work, you need a line like this in your /etc/mail/sendmail.mc file:

define(`ALIAS_FILE', `/etc/aliases,/etc/aliases.mailman')dnl

I'm sure there are lots of other ways to do this. I believe that there are contrib scripts for mailman that more tightly integrate it with sendmail. If you're using Postfix, you can take a look at this suggestion.