I have about 1k+ mails in an inbox (old cronjob stdout). How do I delete them in bulk?
I'm on Solaris 8 and I have only mail available, no pine or mutt or similar "UI"-based client.
Inline help and man page only give d # to delete a specific mail. I've tried for example d 1 - 100 but no luck. And I don't feel like doing d 1000 times.
Any ideas how to clean up this inbox? I'd actually like to purge all mails older than x days.
While mail may not be able to, and you don't have pine or mutt you probably do have mailx. And mailx can d 5-10 or d *.
mail on macOS also supports ranges. d 1-100 works.
If you want to execute a d 1 through d 100, you could generate that sequence of commands and pipe it directly to mail:
i=1; while [ $i -le 100 ]; do echo d $i; i=$(($i+1)); done | mail
d 1, does it renumber subsequent emails? If so, you need to either loop backwards or run d 1 100 times.
do echo "d $i" seems correct.
The following will help you to read the mails during 1 second, delete the mail and move on to the next one. If all mails have been deleted loop will stop.
Want some more time? Change sleep to 2 or more. Want it faster? Replace sleep 1 by a dummy command.
while (echo dq |mail) do sleep 1 ;done
