Re: clearing out /tmp

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

On Sun, 2003-04-13 at 13:15, Steven Pritchard wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 13, 2003 at 05:23:08PM +0000, mike808@users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> > Advice to "switch to Redhat and you won't have this problem" isn't, IMHO, 
> > the most effective response to such a problem.
> 
> Did I say "switch to Red Hat"?  No.  I just said that on Red Hat
> systems with tmpwatch installed, you shouldn't need to worry about it
> in general.  I also tried to imply that tmpwatch is probably available
> for other distributions.
> 
> I just checked, and it definitely comes with both Mandrake and SuSE,
> but not Debian.  A quick Google search shows that Debian comes with a
> similar (apparently enhanced) utility called tmpreaper.

Yes.  tmpreaper is an enhanced tmpwatch.

Also, on Debian systems, /tmp is cleared out as part of the boot
process.  See /etc/rcS.d/S55bootmisc.sh for details if you have a Debian
system.

It's generally better to use such utilities to clean out world-writable
directories like /tmp, instead of writing your own.  Occasionally, there
are good reasons to not delete absolutely everything in there;
sometimes, these are specific to the Linux distribution.  As an example,
the aforementioned bootmisc script in Debian skips lost+found
directories and quota files.  I'm sure tmpwatch and tmpreaper do similar
things.

If your distro doesn't come with something like tmpwatch or tmpreaper,
the source for those two utilities should be easy to find in any
distribution that does provide them.  At a minimum, tmpreaper source can
always be found at:

http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/tmpreaper
-- 
Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>

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