Maybe it's a cross program issue?
We used to randomly have this happen a long time ago, when using
postfix and dovecot.
Since switching to using the dovecot lda/lmtp instead of postfix for
mailbox delievery, I haven't seen this happen at all anymore.
I'm not saying that postfix is at fault for this, but could be a
timing/race issue between postfix/dovecot accesses to the mailbox.
Quoting Cor Bosman <cor@xs4all.nl>:
On Oct 3, 2012, at 12:35 AM, Timo Sirainen <tss@iki.fi> wrote:
On 3.10.2012, at 0.45, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On 3.10.2012, at 0.39, Cor Bosman wrote:
With NFS these files are created when a file gets unlinked, but
another process still has it open. It disappears as soon as the
other process closes it. For some reason they dont disappear. As
far as I can tell we've had no server crashes that could explain
this. One possible theory is that a rename happens after an
unlink. In that case the file remains. This could possibly be a
dovecot issue.How can a rename happen after unlink? The rename should fail.
(Unless doing rename(.nfs1234, something), but Dovecot definitely
isn't doing that.)You could see if this old test program leaves .nfs files lying around:
http://dovecot.org/tmp/readdir.c
Just comment out the line:
close(fd);I meant the .nfs1234 indeed, but it seemed very unlikely. Thanks for
clarifying. The readdir program leaves no .nfs files. We'll have to
explore other possibilities.Cor