[Ilugc] Re: mv NewMail mbox ??
- From: rsubr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Raja Subramanian)
- Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 02:08:50 +1000
Hi,
SaravanaKumar wrote:
Bharathi S wrote:
How to manually move the new mails from /var/spool/mail/$USER to
$USER's mbox ?
cat /var/spool/mail/$USER >> $USER/mbox
echo ""> /var/spool/mail/$USER
what happens when new mail arrives inbetween your 'cat' and your 'echo'
commands? You end up clobbering it. Were mailbox updating this easy, I
would be writing MTAs/MDAs/MUAs ;-)
Updating mail boxes requires carefull file locking to avoid simultaneous
updates (by mta/mda, mua, etc). Add NFS with it's broken file locking
and it's a HUGE headache.
Since the OP has root access, it's best to shutdown the MTA for a few
seconds and ensure other precautions before performing this procedure.
Procmail can be put to work if the above is infeasible.
Also note,
echo "" > mbox
creates a one byte file and creates a possibly invalid mbox. To
truncate a file to zero bytes in bash, I typically do -
:> filename
- Raja
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