[NTLUG:Discuss] Persistence in /tmp

[Leroy Tennison]

Rick Cook wrote:
> On Monday 04 May 2009 22:24:17 Chris Cox wrote:
>> On Tue, 2009-05-05 at 08:20 -0500, Leroy Tennison wrote:
>>> I noticed today that some things I had downloaded days (or months)
>>> ago continued to exist in /tmp as well as other miscellaneous files. 
>>> There were a number of PPD files but also downloaded documents,
>>> directories (empty and not) and socket files.  Most were deletable
>>> but some (even with "old" dates) weren't.
>>>
>>> I was previously under the impression that /tmp was truly temporary
>>> (cleaned up @ shutdown or restart).  Is that an incorrect
>>> understanding or am I seeing the results of program bugs in the
>>> non-current files and directories?
>> It is a misunderstanding.  The idea is that /tmp CAN get cleaned out
>> on a regular basis, but technically, it doesn't even have to cleaned
>> out upon reboot.  So... you can't assume that /tmp gets cleared.
>>
> 
> Several distributions have configuration settings that allow you to set 
> the /tmp and /var/tmp "clearing policy".
> 
> For instance, in Debian, you can set a "maximum age" for files in /tmp in 
> the file "/etc/default/rcS".
> 
> 
> Rick
> 
> 
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Thanks for pointing this out, I need to look at what's being done on 
SuSE 10.3.