I have a file in one of my file server named 'root' in /var/spool/mail. This does not grow beyond 50 MB. I would need to increase that to 100 MB, so that it can store more logs.
Basically it's a sync log file which is very important for us. I'm not a linux techie however I tried with the truncate command, but that serves me a different purpose. I also went through multiple articles here, but I couldn't get the answer I want. Please help!
Thanks in advance!
You should not be using this file for logs, this is not what this file is for. As @HBruijn pointed out, the /var/spool/mail/root file is actually a mailbox for the root user.
If you want to log something, send the log contents to a file in /var/log/<application name>.
If you are running sendmail you can alias root to a regular email account.
sudo vim /etc/aliases
-- or --
sudo nano /etc/aliases
remove the # (hash symbol) from the beginning of the line that says root and then edit the user name that follows it. I think default it will say: #root mark
Then when done editing the file, you can run: sudo newaliases
This only works for sendmail, I don't know if there is a way to redirect roots email for other MTA's.
/var/spool/mail/rootis not a log file, but rather the mailbox for root. The majority of email messages are typically the email messages that get sent by by the cron daemon when a scheduled cron job generates standard output. I you want to properly log something, adjust the cron job to redirect the output you want to record to an actual log file.