[ale] clearing out root's mail

[Jeff Lightner]

Run "lsof /var/spool/mail/root" and see what is using this file. 
Stop the application(s) indicated by lsof.
Do "> var/spool/mail/root" to overwrite the file to be empty.
Restart the application(s) stopped in 2nd step.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of William Fragakis
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 1:12 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes!We run Linux!
Subject: Re: [ale] clearing out root's mail

On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 12:21 -0500, Björn Gustafsson wrote:
> It's unlikely that sendmail would resize the new file unless it was
> *constantly* streaming messages into root's mailbox.  Even then it
> would be strange, since it would have to be ignoring the file's actual
> size when it seeks to the end.
> 
> When you say it "rebuilds", do the old messages also reappear?  
Yes. As fond as I was of 2008, there are some things I'd like to leave
behind.
> Is
> there any chance you're using a different MTA that does something
> special like keeping two hard links to the mailbox file?  That's kind
> of what it sounds like to me.  If you do `ls -l' on the file, does it
> have more than one hard link?  Or maybe it's a symlink?  I'm not
> familiar with CentOS any more, so it may do something unusual like
> that.
does this help?

# ls -l /var/spool/mail/root
-rw------- 1 root root 64662366 Jan  6 09:59 /var/spool/mail/root

thanks,
William

> 
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 10:28 AM, William Fragakis <william at fragakis.com> wrote:
> > I'm running Centos 5.4. Root's mail file has grown to a cumbersome size.
> > I'd like to clear it out but if I follow the advice I've been able to
> > googe and dum/delete/create new  the file (/var/spool/mail/root),
> > sendmail rebuilds it to the original size.  Is there a step I'm missing?
> >
> > thanks,
> > William
> 

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