> Subject: -- MARK -- > Date: Mon, 7 Dec 1998 20:29:52 +0100 (MET) > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Armin Wegner) > To: debian-user@lists.debian.org > > Every twenty minutes my xconsole writes a string consisting of date and time, > my hostname and the string "-- MARK --". What does this mean? This is new and > I can't remember when it first happened and what it caused to do so.
According to man syslogd, this is just the system logging a timestamp in case it has done nothing else worth putting in the log for the last twenty minutes (configurable). If you didn't see it before it might have been because your mail-command was checking for new mail every twenty minutes. If you're getting rows of --MARK-- with nothing in between then you might have changed the "mail-settings". If you're getting '--MARK--' immediatly followed by '/USR/SBIN/CRON (mail) CMD (runq)' then this is probablably nothing to worry about, mail is simply a fraction of a second too slow to stop the system from putting a timestamp in the log.
