[ale] clearing out root's mail

[Michael Still]

personally i would setup /etc/aliases and forward root mail to
somewhere else. problem solved :)

2010/1/6 Björn Gustafsson <bg-ale at bjorng.net>:
> No symlink, and the "1" means only one hard link, so that's not the
> problem.  If the old messages are reappearing, the most likely culprit
> is an email client which is holding the file open and then somehow
> *moving it back* after you have clobbered it.  I am not aware of any
> email client which is that aggressive.
>
> The next thing to check is if there is a process holding the file
> open.  That pretty much *has* to be the case, otherwise the old
> messages would have disappeared.  Try `lsof /var/spool/mail/root' and
> see what processes it reports, then consider killing those processes
> if it seems appropriate.  If killing processes looks like it might
> make sense, you first should follow Jim's advice and move the file to
> another name before doing any killing.  Once there are no processes
> attached, you should be able to delete the moved file and never see
> those emails again.
>
> Other than that, I can only think that some kind of special filesystem
> attributes have been set on the file.  If you do `lsattr
> /var/spool/mail/root' and see anything other than dashes, there might
> be some setting like `a' that prevents the delete/clobber/truncate
> from working (and a move *should* still work in that case as I
> recall).  You can see the set of attributes in `man chattr' if you're
> interested.
>
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 1:11 PM, William Fragakis <william at fragakis.com> wrote:
>> > 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.
>>
>> 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
>
>
> --
> Björn Gustafsson
>
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