The file $HOME/.forward is used by the MDA of a system to allow user-defined treatment of incoming email like e.g. forwarding to another address or handling them over to procmail.

All contained paths have to be given in absolute form.

To have a simple forwarding, e.g. for certain shell accounts which imply an email address, simply put the destination address into the .forward as single entry on a single line:

user@anotherhost.com

To make incoming mail being handled over to another program as it's standard input stream, use a leading pipe-symbol (|) like so:

"| /usr/bin/procmail"

The complete .forward syntax is described in forward(5). Sadly this file doesn't exist on many systems, so here is a local copy of it.