Quieting a jail’s mail, and a prompt that wasn’t mine

I was looking inside the index jail today and found this: root@index:/ # ls -l /var/mail/ total 25 -rw--w---- 1 root mail 51258 Oct 27 03:27 root That jail doesn’t do much. Nobody reads that mail. I wanted it gone. Along the way, I fixed something else which had been bothering me for a while: a broken prompt whenever I used jexec. What was in the mailbox Before turning anything off, I checked what was being sent: grep '^Subject:' /var/mail/root | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn 24 Subject: index daily security run output 24 Subject: index daily run output 3 Subject: index weekly run output All of it is from periodic(8). Nothing from cron. That makes it simple. Sending periodic output to log files periodic can write its reports to a file instead of mailing them. These settings go in /etc/periodic.conf: sysrc -f /etc/periodic.conf daily_output=/var/log/daily.log \ daily_status_security_output=/var/log/daily.log weekly_output=/var/log/weekly.log \ monthly_output=/var/log/monthly.log FreeBSD’s…