UsingWW: huge file in var/mail/

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huge file in var/mail/

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My server is running into disk space issues, so I am looking into what is taking up the most space. In /var/mail/, there is a file called "faculty". (Possibly relevant: "faculty" is a user account on the server. I haven't used it in months, having switched to a new user account that is specific to me.)

There is only one other file in this folder, "root".

The faculty file is 6GB, which is a big chunk of the server's disk space. When I run:

tail -100 /var/mail/faculty

I see lines like:

find: cannot delete `/var/www/wwtmp/mth065-yao-201804/hardcopy/work.CIi5QqwW/pdflatex.stderr': Permission denied

(mth065-yao-201804 is a course on the server, but it is a course from fall 2018.)

Does anyone understand the purpose of this file? Or if it is safe to delete it?

Re: huge file in var/mail/

by Alex Jordan - Saturday, 30 March 2019, 5:49 PM

It turns out that there is a cronjob to delete files from /var/www/wwtmp/. And it was hitting permissions issues while doing that. And then sending a message to the 'faculty' user's mail. It had been growing since, my guess is 2013.

Deleted the file, and addressed the underlying permissions issue.