hi gurus and guys!

I need a shell or perl script or small software which would keep
recent certain number of mails(say last 5000 mails) from mailbox of a
mail user account and delete all other older mails from its mailbox. I
m using UNIX OS, and have user mailboxes in /var/mail/*. Does anyone
of you have such a
shell or perl script or small software which would serve this purpose?
Or do you have this information?  Your help will be appreciated.

Thank you in advanced.

Hi!

Here's a script for you.  USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!  This script goes
under each subdirectory of /var/mail/ (assumed to be a mailbox), and
then deletes all the oldest emails past 5000 in count.

One caveat is that this script uses the mtime (last modified time)
when determining the age of the email.  So its possible to circumvent
the whole system by going in and 'touching' the raw email file, and
thereby updating its mtime.

my $base = '/var/mail';
my $max_mail_items = 5000;

opendir MAILBOXES, $base;
### Get an array of mailboxes
my @mailboxes = grep { $_ ne '.' && $_ ne '..' } readdir MAILBOXES;
closedir MAILBOXES;

foreach my $mb (@mailboxes)
{
  my $mailbox = "$base/$mb";
  ### Make sure we're only looking at directories
  next unless -d $mailbox;

  opendir MAIL, $mailbox;
  ### Read all the files in the mailbox, weed out '.' and '..', and sort by mtime
  my @mail = sort { (stat "$mailbox/$b")[9] <=> (stat
"$mailbox/$a")[9] } grep { $_ ne '.' && $_ ne '..' } readdir MAIL;

  ### Pull out all the oldest mail over 5000
  my @old_mail = splice(@mail, $max_mail_items + 1);

  foreach my $mail (@old_mail)
  {
    ### Delete it!
    unlink "$mailbox/$mail";
  }
}