[ale] clearing out root's mail

[Björn Gustafsson]

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?  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.

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