How to clear old mail in Linux?

Question

I want to clear the Linux mail for my account every day at 10pm. How can I accomplish it?

What part of the mail man page makes you think you can schedule things with mail? — Anthon, Sep 27 '16 at 07:01

score 2 · Answer 1 · 2016-09-26T22:54:25.767

2

You could crontab -e to edit your personal list of cron jobs, and add the line:

0 22 * * * : > /var/mail/"$(whoami)"

which will, at 22:00 (10pm) every day, overwrite the file /var/mail/<your username> with empty data. If your mail file is stored somewhere else, you would need to change the path.

edited Sep 26 '16 at 22:54

answered Sep 26 '16 at 21:01

1

It's better to use : > /var/mail/"$(whoami)" as not all shells support empty redirection. – heemayl Sep 26 '16 at 21:13

How to clear old mail in Linux?

1 Answers1