Too Much Mail

[David Crowe]

The ROOT mailbox is approaching 280 MB and is too large to open. Is there a way to delete this mail without opening it or can I just go into var/mail/ and delete the file.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi David:

If you want to dispose of everything, just:

# cat /dev/null > /var/mail/

...JRF...

[someone_4]

hello
if you dont want the mail
> /var/mail

[someone_4]

what is the difference in
cat /dev/null > /var/mail/
and
> /var/mail/


Richard

[Jim Turner]

Richard,

About 14 bytes' worth of KB input :-)

Cheers,
Jim

[Sanjay_6]

Hi David,

You can delete the file too. It will recreate the file if it gets any new mail. Else yoou can make its size as "0"

cat /dev/null >/var/mail/root

Thanks

[Victor_5]

Try to use tail to open the file, if you have make sure you donot need them any more, you can use the attached shell to clear them. The shell can be put in crontab.

tail /var/mail/root

Shawn

[David Crowe]

Thanks everybody for your replies. I thought that's what I need to do but I was worried because it creates a "sys" file and not a "mail" file. Once it writes to it, will change to a mail file?

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

David,

root mailbox will have some important messages like cron failures, EMS messsages etc.,. So you would want to keep a copy of it before you null it. So, move it to another file system that has some space. It is growing means system really wants to tell you something.

#cp /var/mail/root /another_file_system
#cat /dev/null > /var/mail/root

Now you can use pg or cat command to view this file to see what the messages are. Once you are satisfied that there is no danger indicated in it, you can delete it from that file system.

I know I won't get cents for this message but thought of letting you know.

-Sri

[Wodisch]

Hello,

a UN*X mailbox is just a text file (maybe a huge one ;-)
and the syntax for SMTP mail (=UN*X) is pretty simple...
At least test for the "subject" lines of all those mails:

grep "^Subject: " /var/spool/mail | more

before you delete it - there might be an interesting
message in there!

HTH,
Wodisch