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Operating Systems AIX /var/spool/mail/<username> files' content wipeout impact Post 302906546 by bakunin on Friday 20th of June 2014 01:35:05 PM
Old 06-20-2014
Amen to what ibmtech and rbatte1 said, they are correct.

In principle it is the duty of the admin to read such messages. Having said this: reading several GB of text messages might take you longer than your active job life and i bet the first of these messages are from a time computers ran on steadm, not on electric power.

Therefore i suggest you: delete the mail file for "XXXX". This is an ordinary user and he should have checked his mail when he had the opportunity. This gives you some free space back.

Second, log on as root and open the mail. Delete all messages save for the last 100 or so and read these. Perhaps there is a pattern to them and what you have deleted is either outdated or repetition of this pattern anyway.

Do the same for the Oracle user. See the man page of "mail" on how to delete a range of messages. It will tell you how many messages there are in the inbox, so you can calculate how many you can delete. Note that they are sorted chronologically with the newest messages holding the highest numbers.

From now on you should read the mails to root and other system users daily. Either these messages are important and will help you better administer the system OR they are superfluous and you should switch their generation off at the source.

On a second thought: if you do not check the mail regularly you probably do not trim /var/adm/wtmp either. You might have a look at it and maybe trim it. DO NOT delete it! "zap" the file:

Code:
cat /dev/null > /var/adm/wtmp


I hope this helps.

bakunin
This User Gave Thanks to bakunin For This Post:
 

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readmail(1)						      General Commands Manual						       readmail(1)

NAME
readmail - read mail from a mail folder or incoming mailbox SYNOPSIS
folder] [number-list|pattern] DESCRIPTION
The program displays messages from your incoming mailbox or a specified mail folder. Within the mail system (see elm(1) with no operands and optionally the or option, displays the appropriate headers and the body of the cur- rent message. With the number-list operand and no options, displays the corresponding messages and a summary of the headers from your incoming mailbox. With the pattern operand and no options, displays the first message that matches the pattern and a summary of the headers from your incom- ing mailbox. Options supports the following options. Print all messages that match pattern. If no pattern was specified, this option is ignored. Use file folder for the operations instead of the incoming mailbox. Include the entire header of the matched message or messages when displaying their text. The default is to display the and lines only. Exclude all headers. Put form feeds ( between message headers. This is useful when printing sets of messages. Operands supports the following operands. number-list A blank-separated list of the ordinal locations of messages in the mail file (i.e., their "message numbers"), up to 25 at a time. The character means the last message in the mail file. Similarly, represents every message in the file (i.e., The message numbers are sorted into ascending order. Thus, produces the same output as pattern A string that is present in one of the messages. This pattern can be typed in directly (no quotes) if the words are separated by a single space in the actual message. The pattern matching is case sensitive, so and are not equiva- lent. Leading digits (on the first word) are not permitted; however, you can precede them with a space and quote the entire string, if the space occurs in the message, as in . EXAMPLES
If you are using to reply to a message from within the mail system, you can insert the text of the current message with the command: If you define an alias similar to: you can use it with a program such to peruse mail as it arrives, without needing to start a mail system (see newmail(1)). AUTHOR
was developed by HP. FILES
Incoming mailbox Temporary file for SEE ALSO
elm(1), newmail(1), vi(1). readmail(1)
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