On a server running Ubuntu 14.04 I see You have new mail
in the motd every time I log in via SSH.
Q: Who is telling me this?
Mail does not find anything, and I do not expect any mails on this server.
crontab for "me" and "root" contains MAILTO=""
.
The text You have new mail
is not present in /etc/motd
or /var/run/motd
.
Some commands I hope are relevant:
me@AtomServer:~$mail
No mail for me
me@AtomServer:~$sudo mail
No mail for root
me@AtomServer:~$sudo ls -l /var/mail
total 8
-rw------- 1 la mail 1 Jul 15 22:12 me
-rw------- 1 root mail 1 Jul 27 19:59 root
me@AtomServer:~$
me@AtomServer:~$grep '^s.*motd' /etc/pam.d/sshd
session optional pam_motd.so # [1]
me@AtomServer:~$$ls -la /etc/update-motd.d
total 48
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 13 13:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 127 root root 12288 Jul 27 20:06 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1220 Apr 19 2012 00-header
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1358 Apr 19 2012 10-help-text
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 46 Jan 30 21:57 50-landscape-sysinfo -> /usr/share/landscape/landscape-sysinfo.wrapper
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 149 Aug 22 2011 90-updates-available
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 129 Sep 30 2011 91-release-upgrade
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 129 Jun 16 2014 95-hwe-eol
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 142 Aug 22 2011 98-fsck-at-reboot
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 144 Aug 22 2011 98-reboot-required
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1158 Apr 19 2012 99-footer
me@AtomServer:~$
me@AtomServer:/etc/update-motd.d$grep -ri 'mail' *
me@AtomServer:/etc/update-motd.d$
/etc/motd.tail
does not exist.
Best Answer
Well, this is being done your shell itself. Apparently it is monitoring the file (or directory) pointed by the
MAIL
(orMAILPATH
) environment variable.This is documented in
man bash
:On a different note the contents of
motd
is actually governed by the PAM modulepam_motd
(the shell might have something to add though as per user configuration files).By default
pam_motd
shows the static content of the/etc/motd
file along with the dynamic outputs generated from running scripts in the/etc/update-motd.d
directory (usingrun-parts
).