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Jordan Reiter
Asked: 2011-06-01 08:39:41 +0800 CST

Checking another user's mail using sudo

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How can I check the mailbox of another user in Linux (CentOS)? Basically I want to replicate the 

$ mail

command but when sudo-ed as another user.

Right now if I try to just do 

$ sudo -u johndoe mail

I get 

/var/spool/mail/jordan: Permission denied

Same thing if I use

$ sudo su johndoe

and then run the mail command.

email sudo

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Try this:

    sudo su - johndoe -c mail

    The - parameter to su should take care of setting up the environment for johndoe so the right mailbox is accessed.

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