Hi ,
I have backed up my clients mailbox /var/spool/mail/client as client1. After i finish re-builing the sendmail config , i want to restore the backed file. But i found that the spooling starts and the new inbox start growing.
Is there a way to overwrite client with client1 without clearing the contents of client.
I mean append client with client1.

Thanks in Advance.

if i understand correctly you are trying to append info from client1 to client

not sure how fast and how large your lof file is, but you should be able to do everything through cat and embedding commands, and if log file is not large, then you will not miss any data


cat client1 client >> client3 && mv client client.BACKUP && mv client3 client
you can also do same thing with sed, do man on it for right syntax.

if it is not what you are trying to do please correct me.

Yes you are correct. The purpose is to finally append the files, but as it is a mail box , i don't want mails ton repeat. can you tell me while i append
cat client1 client >> client3 && mv client client.BACKUP && mv client3 client
Shall i get no duplicate mails. I mean during append, i want the contents of files(whichever file it may be) must not be duplicated??
Waiting for your reply??

if both of your mailboxes not containing duplicate information, then you will not receive duplicates, however if they are containing duplicates then you have to filter your mailbox to remove them, also if you are working with a mailbox file it has a From line that is starting a message and each message is separated by a single blank line, once you will cat those 2 files together it is not going to add that line for you, so you will recieve a currupted mailbox file or a message, so before you do that, make sure to add a blank line to the end of a first file, before putting both of the files together. (or you can add a blank line to your sencond message, but it will have to be at the beginning of your spool file) that way you will avoid that curruption.

if you need something to filter your mailbox for a duplicated let me know i think i had a script somewhere that can do that for you.