How to manage /var/mail/root file

Question

The size of /var/mail/root has been increasing as i am using lot of cron jobs and may cause memory shortage.

Is it wise to delete that file? How to manage this problem?

Solution

You should handle these kind of issues with logrotate, it is designed for these tasks specifically.

For example, to enable logrotate to rotate the file /var/mail/root if the size of the file becomes 10 MB, you can add a logrotate configuration file e.g. /etc/logrotate.d/mailroot with the content:

/var/mail/root {
        # Rotate if the size is >=10MB:
        size 10M  

        # Keep 5 rotated logs:
        rotate 5

        # Do not rotate if empty:
        notifempty 

        # Compresses rotated logs, default:
        compress  
}

You can define for the whole directory too using wildcard, *, so that it will be applicable to all files under it:

/var/mail/* {

....

}

As logrotate is run daily by cron (anacron), you do not need to add any cron entry if the configuration is put in /etc/logroate.conf or /etc/logroate.d/*. You can also define your own crontab entry if the configuration file resides elsewhere, you might also need a state file that will contain the current file rotation tatus.

Most importantly, check man logroate and man 5 logroate.conf to get more idea and options.

Comments

[GammaGames]

If anyone gets any permissions issues, you can add su root mail to tell logrotate which user and group to use with the config