can not see mails

Hi,
on AIX 6.1, I want to verify my night batch then I issued mail and :

> mail
/tmp: No space left on device

What does it mean ? How can I see my mails ?
What shoud I do ?

Also :

df -k
/dev/hd3           131072    125676    5%       46     1% /tmp

Thank you.

Maybe check if your /var has enough space too. Mails are held in /var/spool/mail/<username> .
You could also try to expand /tmp and after you cleaned up your mails, shrink it, if the space is scarce on it's rootvg.

Thanks, but :

 cd /var/spool/mai
bash: cd: /var/spool/mai: No such file or directory

Either you have a typo missing the l (L) in mail, or you have most probably a different, similar sounding directory in /var where your mail files are being spooled in. For the second case, you have to use your wits.

I have no AIX 6 at hand, but in 5.3 and 7.1 it is /var/spool/mail .

1 Like

The "mail" command creates workfiles in the directory /tmp . If your mail file is very large (in you case say 50 Mb) there will not be enough space in /tmp to carry out the mail file edit with the "mail" command.
As advised earlier, first look at a directory listing of /var/spool/mail and see how big the mail file(s) are.

If you are in a hurry and have somewhere else with more free space you could try "mailx" having set a new value for $TMPDIR (see "man mailx").

On my system it would take under a year for root mail to reach 100 Mb . We use a cron to archive root mail daily at 12:00 and just keep 2 weeks worth of day files. It's too much labour to delete mail with the "mail" command.

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Ok , thanks to all.
Effectively it is in :

/var/spool/mail

With 1 Gb size.