mail.log not working

[Jeffrey F. Goldsmith]

Last week I was trying to figure out why root wasn't forwarding mail to me using the .forward file. I noticed that the mail.log file was quite large so I made a copy of it and then emptyed it out. Once I did that I have found that nothing is being written into it anymore. What did I do wrong?

[Christopher Caldwell · Accepted solution]

If you mv the file and don't truncate it (e.g. cat /dev/null > mail.log), you've got to restart syslog (kill -HUP _PID_OF_SYSLOG)).

[RAC_1]

Did you restart syslogd??
Is /etc/yslog.conf correct. The column seperator is tab and not space.
Is enough free space??

Anil

[Jeffrey F. Goldsmith]

/etc/syslog.conf looks right. Here it is.
root: /etc ==> more syslog.conf
# @(#) $Revision: 74.1 $
#
# syslogd configuration file.
#
# See syslogd(1M) for information about the format of this file.
#
mail.debug /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
*.info;mail.none /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log
*.alert /dev/console
*.alert root
*.emerg *
root: /etc ==>

[Jeffrey F. Goldsmith]

Chris,

I guess I need to restart syslog. Is the kill step you sent to me what I need to do to restart it?

kill -HUP _PID_OF_SYSLOG

[Jeffrey F. Goldsmith]

With Chris's help I was able to figure out that i needed to kill syslog and then restart it.