On Wed, 2001-10-24 at 00:48, Jussi Ekholm wrote: > Kurt Lieber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > By default (at least on Woody) exim puts mail in /var/mail/<username> > > (note the absence of /spool/) > > I'm running testing, and I have both - /var/mail/$USER and > /var/spool/mail/$USER. Why is this? The file sizes are equal, so > they appear to be identical twins. Any ideas why there's two places > for mail? This, of course, isn't really a problem - I'm just curious > why the mail spool is located in two places.
One is a symbolic link: ls -l /var/spool/mail lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 16 03:30 /var/spool/mail -> ../mail If you change directory to /var/spool/mail you will be transparently mapped into ../mail (/var/mail). The only space used up is the space to store the link. There is only one copy of the files. It is probably done for compatibility. Some programs may access /var/mail. Some may access /var/spool/mail. Everything works. Symbolic links are incredibly useful. If you saw my post about having a data and OS partition here's how you could achieve it: If your OS is mounted at / If your data partition is mounted at /mnt/data_partition Then you could store all home files on the data partition by doing this as root (backup advice applies first): cd / mv /home /mnt/data_partition ln -s /mnt/data_partition/home /home Then any program accessing the /home directory will automatically access them on the separate partition. Regards, Adam
