very big mbox in root directory (/)

[Percy Glaves]

Dear Sirs,

On my HPUX 10.20 workstation, I suddenly
got a very big mbox file in the root dir (/) owned by root:sys.

This is of course a mail file, with lots of
concatenated mails. I guess is the root user mail box.

I don't understand how this mbox ended up in / since the root dir for user root is /home/root and the normal mail dir is /var/mail

Can I safely delete this file?

Thanks for your help and support

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Yes.

[Rick Garland · Accepted solution]

/dev/null the file 1st - just to be safe in case the sendmail process is holding on to it. After you null the file do some checking. Is the MAIL variable set correctly? Did someone move it? Or copy it?

[DCE]

yes you can delete it

You may want to reconsider /home/root for rots home directory - what happens if /home mount point crashes?

much better off creating a /root directory (I know it is on /) for root that is 700 permissions. that way if you have to come up in single user mode you have access to roots home directory.

you can still keep /home/root and use it for storing output from scripts etc.

[Percy Glaves]

I don't think anybody has copied that file there (is owned by root).

MAIL is set to /var/mail/root for root

by /dev/null you mean "cp /dev/null mbox" ?

Thanks

[Douglas Cameron]

Percy,

It is generally safe to delete that, unless it is being used by administrators to resolve a strange mail issue, or is beinf filtered by an administrator to retrieve mail messages that were n ot preserved or saved. You may want to look at your mail config file and see if set keep is included in it - just in case mail messages were not being saved.

Just an idea.

[Patrick Wallek]

An easier way to do the same thing as 'cp /dev/null file' is to do '> file'.