Bezerk Mailman Loose In My System!

[Bill Jonas]

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On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 04:00:58PM -0700, Ed Skinner wrote:
>      Feeling cavalier, I tried 'rm -f error*' but got the complaint 'bash=
:=20
> /bin/rm: Argument list too long'. [Cool!]
=2E..
>      B) A "quickie" for removing the quarter million error files? (What w=
ould=20
> you think of 'rm -rf /var/log/mailman; mkdir /var/log/mailman' and make s=
ure=20
> I get owner, group and permissions set back correctly again?)

If you don't want to actually remove the directory, you could try
something like "ls -1f |grep '^error.*' |xargs rm" (or "rm -f").
xargs(1) will run the specified command as many times as necessary to
accomplish the job with the argument list at an acceptable length.  The
-f argument to ls(1) specifies that it should not sort the output (which
is undoubtedly what was taking so long).  The grep is in there simply so
that you don't get '.' and '..' (and files you don't want to delete) in
the output.  ("ls -1f error*" gives you the same problem as "rm -f
error*", since the shell expands the file specification, ie, you'd get
something like 'bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long' or something
similar.)

That said, simply removing the directory and recreating it with the
proper permissions *would* work, but you don't need to do that.  You'd
also lose the other Mailman logs in that directory.

>      A) What might be wrong? ('man mailman' was NFG and I didn't find=20
> 'mailman' in the man pages for mail, sendmail or fetchmail, -- I'm using=
=20
> kmail as my mail reader but, there again, found no reference to 'mailman'=
 so=20
> I'm stumped as to who creates the entries in /var/log/mailman), and

Try looking in /usr/share/doc/mailman (or the equivalent directory on
your distribution; this location works for Debian and some other
distributions).  I've administered a Mailman mailing list, but I've
never hacked on Mailman itself, so I'm unsure what's causing the
problem.

--=20
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/
"They that can give up  essential  liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."        -- Benjamin Franklin

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