Some users have accounts on other machines under different login names. This can happen when moving from one job to another, for example. At the first job you might be named ellen and at the next job you might have the login name ewinstin. If your mail is being forwarded to you from your old job, you can use this -a switch to have vacation recognize you under your old login name in addition to your current login name:

|"/usr/ucb/vacation -a ellen ewinstin"

You can add as many other names as you want by adding a -a command-line switch for each. A system administrator, for example, might have a half dozen names under which mail is received:

|"/usr/ucb/vacation -a root -a postmaster -a bin -a sys kate"

Note that vacation does a word match when it looks for each name. That is, only letters and numbers count in a word, so root will not match rootbugs, but will match root+bugs or root@host.