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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers How safe is it to remove files(/var/spool/mail)? Post 90718 by Perderabo on Saturday 26th of November 2005 09:28:30 AM
Old 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?
 

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uucleanup(1M)						  System Administration Commands					     uucleanup(1M)

NAME
uucleanup - uucp spool directory clean-up SYNOPSIS
/usr/lib/uucp/uucleanup [-Ctime] [-Dtime] [-mstring] [-otime] [-ssystem] [-Wtime] [-xdebug-level] [-Xtime] DESCRIPTION
uucleanup will scan the spool directories for old files and take appropriate action to remove them in a useful way: o Inform the requester of send/receive requests for systems that can not be reached. o Return undeliverable mail to the sender. o Deliver rnews files addressed to the local system. o Remove all other files. In addition, there is a provision to warn users of requests that have been waiting for a given number of days (default 1 day). Note: uucle- anup will process as if all option times were specified to the default values unless time is specifically set. This program is typically started by the shell uudemon.cleanup, which should be started by cron(1M). OPTIONS
-Ctime Remove any C. files greater or equal to time days old and send appropriate information to the requester (default 7 days). -Dtime Remove any D. files greater or equal to time days old, make an attempt to deliver mail messages, and execute rnews when appropriate (default 7 days). -mstring Include string in the warning message generated by the -W option. The default line is "See your local administrator to locate the problem". -otime Delete other files whose age is more than time days (default 2 days). -ssystem Execute for system spool directory only. -Wtime Any C. files equal to time days old will cause a mail message to be sent to the requester warning about the delay in con- tacting the remote. The message includes the JOBID, and in the case of mail, the mail message. The administrator may include a message line telling whom to call to check the problem (-m option) (default 1 day). -xdebug-level Produce debugging output on standard ouput. debug-level is a single digit between 0 and 9; higher numbers give more detailed debugging information. (This option may not be available on all systems.) -Xtime Any X. files greater or equal to time days old will be removed. The D. files are probably not present (if they were, the X. could get executed). But if there are D. files, they will be taken care of by D. processing (default 2 days). FILES
/usr/lib/uucp directory with commands used by uucleanup internally /var/spool/uucp spool directory ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWbnuu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
uucp(1C), uux(1C), cron(1M), attributes(5) SunOS 5.10 19 May 1993 uucleanup(1M)
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