How safe is it to remove files(/var/spool/mail)? - UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

larcom61 · #1 11-25-2005

How safe is it to remove these spooler mail files.

I need to make some room in the /usr directory?

Any ideas?

thanks

Perderabo · #2 11-26-2005

If you remove a file called, say, fred, then the user "fred" will lose all of his mail. There should be no other consequence. If fred gets new mail, another file called fred will appear. I do stuff like that...usually because fred has some cron job sending him mail once an hour or something. So rather than repeatedly deal with it, I then create a ~fred/.forward containing "nobody".

But removing stuff in /var/spool/mail will not usually free space in /usr. With a really screwy symlink, it is possible...but are you sure that your system is set up like that?

npn · #3 12-01-2005

Removing this files will not affect anything per se. But you need to make sure that the files are not required.

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