Maurice Hendrix writes:
>I've already received and read mail (using pine) from a local user
>and from cron. With no problems. 'mail' is not installed. I installed
>'pine', so I figured I wouldn't need to install 'mail'.
It's not clear to me that you have actually tried to do as I
suggested. Is your assertion that 'mail is not installed' on the
basis that you have tried to run it and got "mail: command not found",
or on the basis that you haven't knowingly installed it?
(Note that that a 'command not found' report from root is not
conclusive evidence of its absence from your system, since the PATH is
much more limited for root than for other users; try '/bin/mail'
instead.)
Naturally it is wise to be wary of running unfamiliar commands as
root, which is why I suggested reading 'man mail' first. This should
be among your man pages in section 1.
Let me try to explain more clearly.
The message "You have new mail." is (almost certainly) being generated
as a result of a test being made in /etc/profile (but perhaps in
/root/.profile ). If you look in there, I expect you will find
something like
/bin/mail -e
case $? in
0)
echo "You have new mail."
;;
...
esac
As you can see, if something like this is present, then 'mail' IS
installed, contrary to your assertion. Indeed, 'mail' is such a
venerable part of the Unix heritage (to which Linux belongs) that I
would be *very* surprised if it were not so.
If it is not present, contrary to my expectation, then you may still
be able to locate which tool is being used to check whatever the
mailbox is for root on your machine.
As for pine: pine can only read mailboxes it knows about. On the
system I habitually use, 'mail' reads from a mailbox in
/var/mail/*user* - in your 'root' case that would be /var/mail/root .
However, you should check the mail(1) man page for its location on
your system.
Is your 'root' pine set up to read root's mail from that mailbox?
(Probably not, but I may be mistaken.) Is the mailbox in a format
compatible to pine? (Probably, but I'm not certain.)
You should be able to find out the answers to these by examining your
pine configuration and the associated documentation.
David.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
