UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

I have a monitoring script in unix and any error messages it gives is stored as a mail in the unix box. Like wise it has accumulated lot of emails when i type mail command.

I have few questions.

1.How do i sort and read the mails--begining oldest to newest
2. In one of the box i typed mail and read all the messages . The next time i use the same command it doesnt show anything. Does it mean that the messages are gone or only the unread messages will be shown and the read messages are stored somewhere?
3. If i want to write a clean-up script so that i want to delete all the older mails more than 30 days old, how is it possible.

Thanks in advance

Do read you manual page for mail man mail first as there may be some variation based on operating system.

I don't know how to get them in reverse, but you can normally step through a page at a time by issuing z <enter> and that may help.

The second thing is that mail is often swept into a file in your home directory called mbox or .mbox after you have used the mail command. The get at it, try mail -f mbox (or .mbox of course)

It might be pretty tricky to auto-clean your mailbox. Perhaps you could script something that saves all the day's mail to a file and either have a history of the required number of days, or use the date as part of the name and issue a find to dispose of the older ones, e.g.

Code:

find . -name mbox* -mtime +30 -exec rm @~ \;

Like i said at the begginning though, read you manual pages carefully first.



Robin
liverpool/Blackburn
UK

Reading between the lines. If the monitoring script is running from unix "cron" any unredirected output will appear in the mail for the user owning the cron. If you redirect ALL output from the cron job to a file (or in selected cases /dev/null) there will be no email generated.
Hope this helps.