UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

HI,

I am pretty new to Unix...but here is 1 serious problem...atleast for me..:-)

now..the dead.letter file in /var/tmp has been growin continuously..n i dont know why..I ve even killed the sendmail process..but the dead.letter file keeps on increasin..Can anyone tell me where do I start from..as I cant even open the dead.letter file to read:-(

Thank you
Sam

You might be able to just zero the size of the dead.letter file using

Code:

cat /dev/null > /var/tmp/dead.letter

which at least will provide a temporary solution.

something is trying to create mail and erroring out.

have the owner of the file open it to examine whom is trying to send the email.

Hi,
Thank you for the replies.


Is there any possible way to see which user/script is tryin to send those mails?

Thank you
Sam

Well, you could find out who is the owner of the file by doing an

Code:

ls -l /var/tmp/dead.letter

The third column will contain the owners username.

As Optimus said above, have the owner of the file open it and see whats going on.

Doing
lsof /var/tmp/dead.letter
will tell you which PIDs and users are accessing the file at the time.

thank you everyone..its solved:-)