How to repair a broken seen state file

[Gary Mills]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 10:26:33AM -0400, Wesley Craig wrote:
> 
> 058C is an offset in hex.  If you truncate the file at this point,  
> you should be able to proceed.  Obviously, everything after that will  
> be gone, but in my experience, these error typically occur at the end  
> of skiplist files, so you probably won't lose much if anything.   
> Also, this user's mail probably looks quite odd, e.g., all new mail  
> is always unseen.  Anyway, something like:
> 
> 	dd if=/imap/conf/user/O/inqarts.seen of=/imap/conf/user/O/ 
> inqarts.seen.fixed bs=1420 count=1
> and
> 	mv /imap/conf/user/O/inqarts.seen.fixed 
> 	/imap/conf/user/O/inqarts.seen
> 
> Make sure /imap/conf/user/O/inqarts.seen is still permitted correctly.

I neglected to mention that I'd already tried that...

  # dd if=inqarts.seen of=inqarts.seen.new bs=1 count=1420
  1420+0 records in
  1420+0 records out
  # chmod 600 inqarts.seen.new
  # mv inqarts.seen inqarts.seen.old && mv inqarts.seen.new inqarts.seen
  # ll -t inqarts.*
  -rw-------   1 cyrus    mail        1420 Mar 28 14:11 inqarts.seen
  -rw-------   1 cyrus    mail       10052 Mar 28 11:37 inqarts.seen.old
  -rw-------   1 cyrus    mail         320 Feb 21 10:53 inqarts.sub

It still logged the same error afterwards.  I guess I'll have to try
something more drastic now.

-- 
-Gary Mills-    -Unix Support-    -U of M Academic Computing and Networking-