On Thu 08 Jul 2021 at 10:46:08 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Thu, Jul 08, 2021 at 04:35:48PM +0200, Hans wrote: > > Am Donnerstag, 8. Juli 2021, 16:27:38 CEST schrieb The Wanderer: > > Zhat is strange, as I also can not delete the file /var/mail/myusername > > manually - just because of access rights. > > You're not supposed to be able to delete that file. You should, however, > be able to truncate it to zero bytes in size. > > The issue that most people face with centralized /var/mail (or > /var/spool/mail) mbox files is locking. You can't create a "dot-lock" > file in the spool directory, for the same reason that you can't delete > your inbox (or create your inbox, if it doesn't already exist). > > Therefore, mutt normally includes a locking helper program, which is > setgid mail (or whatever is needed on the target platform), which can > create/remove dot-lock files in the spool directory. > > On Debian, it looks like this: > > unicorn:~$ dpkg -L mutt | grep lock > /usr/bin/mutt_dotlock > /usr/share/man/man1/mutt_dotlock.1.gz > unicorn:~$ ls -ld /usr/bin/mutt_dotlock > -rwxr-sr-x 1 root mail 14496 Jun 6 15:11 /usr/bin/mutt_dotlock* > > If you're getting errors about locking failure, it could be because > you're missing this. > > If you're getting errors about not being able to delete your inbox file, > ignore those. Or file a bug report asking the developers to kindly > tell mutt not to try doing things it shouldn't be doing.
A helpful summary. > I have no idea whether my current version of mutt would try to delete > a central-spool mbox file if I removed all of the messages from it, for > two reasons: I am *so* far from having an empty inbox that the concept > of removing all the messages is ludicrous, and I don't use a central-spool > mbox file. I'm using $HOME/Maildir/. Likely not, on several counts: . if you have "no idea", then it's unlikely that you've changed "save_empty" to no (the default), . mutt doesn't remove a central-spool mbox file, . mutt doesn't remove MH and Maildir directories. But I'm not sure why the OP thinks they should be able to remove a file from: drwxrwsr-x 2 root mail 4096 8. Jul 16:02 mail in their followup. Cheers, David.
