From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040808 Firefox/0.9.3 Description of problem: If the /tmp filesystem is full, running /bin/mail when you _do_ have mails in your mail spool file results in the following: # /bin/mail panic: Message temporary file corrupted Abortado (core dumped) # Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): mailx-8.1.1-32 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. echo a mail|mail root 2. dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/large_file 3. /bin/mail Actual Results: Got a core file generated in current directory (not in /tmp). Expected Results: I expected mail to handle the situation gracefully - if the copy of the mail spool file in /tmp/ is zero size or non-existent, or not parsable (if it was truncated), /bin/mail should display a sensible error message and exit with a non-zero exit code. Additional info: If nothing else, I suggest changing the message from: "panic: Message temporary file corrupted" ... to something like: "panic: Message temporary file (/tmp/wibble) corrupted, missing or zero size." where /tmp/wibble should be replaced with the name of the temporary mail spool file that /bin/mail was attempting to read. This would give the user a pointer to go and check out /tmp. The current error message doesn't provide anything like enough detail.
Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.
Problem still occurs in FC3 and FC4. Interestingly, problem is not seen if running as root, maybe because extra inodes/space are reserved for root when a partition is at "100%"??
Hello, thank you for your notice. Mailx error message "Message temporary file corrupted" looks right. This error message describes problem quite enough (tmp file was created - so this file is not missing, but the problem is its content, this file must not have zero size - but it is possible).