[CDBUG-talk] /usr/bin/mail problem

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 2:42 PM -0400 6/2/05, Toll, Eric wrote:
>Hello list, I am running FreeBSD AMD64 Hammer on a dual
>opteron server I build by hand.  It's 64 Bit but feels just
>like the x86 (i386) version only faster...

Well, it is true that we're still finding the occasional bug
in amd64 support.  ("we" == "The FreeBSD project")

>Anyway the whole system runs very good, except that when I
>sign in to root account it says "You have mail" yet when I
>type mail, I get nothing.
>
>'which mail' yeilds /usr/bin/mail
>
>How does one troubleshoot this?

First see what files you have under /var/mail

There would be one file there for any file which has some mail
pending.  You may also see some 0-byte files there for some
userids.  Then see what is returned by the command 'whoami'.

Then see what values you have for the environment variables
USER, LOGNAME, and MAIL.  Eg:

      echo USER=$USER LOGNAME=$LOGNAME MAIL=$MAIL

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu