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I have a CRON script that emails daily using mutt.

This script has begun to fail, and I now get an email from cron stating:

Can't dotlock /root/sent.

Couldn't lock /root/sent

Could not send the message.

The wierd thing is that I get this email from cron fine, but mutt can't send email. The cron job is run by root, so I don't think this is a permissions issue.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Josiah
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  • cron reports are sent using `sendmail` by default, so unless you've changed that, it's still the same. – Chris S Aug 23 '10 at 20:06

1 Answers1

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Is there a /root/sent file/directory/link/other existent ? Is there an other process which take the lock for a while ? Check with lsof -n | grep /root/sent. The rights are good on this file ?

Dom
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    There was a /root/sent.lock file, I deleted this file and it worked! – Josiah Aug 25 '10 at 20:45
  • Sorry for necro but in my case i have no /root/sent, no /root/sent.lock, lsof reports no /root/sent* in use, and there are no other mutt processes active either ... I'm still getting this message. I'm stumped. Any other ideas? – Normadize Feb 04 '18 at 00:14
  • What is your user ? Is it root or the home dir is bad defined ? Check if you can read and write to the /root dir. Check if the partition is read-only. – Dom Feb 04 '18 at 09:15