Is it safe to clean /tmp before shutdown ?

garo

I was thinking of putting the following in my "/etc/conf.d/local.stop" :

NiklasH · Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2003 1:39 pm Post subject:

I don't think a cron job would be very good, since you might have some large build going overnight, which could be broken if its files suddenly are wiped in the middle of the build. I'd vote for local.stop, since it's less annoying than having to wait for /tmp to clean up when you boot your computer. (Although I'd imagine that it wouldn't take that long, either)

Naan Yaar · Bodhisattva Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 1549

You can also emerge tmpwatch with ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 and then run it from cron.daily (RedHat does this to clean out temp. directories). This has the advantage of working even if you don't reboot very often.

garo · Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2003 2:06 pm Post subject:

Naan Yaar · Bodhisattva Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 1549

Looks like the exploit is fixed. You can use it with the -s option to avoid deleting opened files. It also have a time setting that checks for access time before blowing away something. This works fine in practice.

Naan Yaar · Bodhisattva Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 1549

There may be others like this though.

local.stop is called before all other services are stopped. So, it is not absolutely guaranteed that /tmp would not be used at this point. You can fire off tmpwatch from local.stop with a access time setting of 0 and a "-s" option (you would need to make a symlink from /usr/bin/fuser to /sbin/fuser for -s to work); this will avoid killing files that are open. You can also cook up a homebrew solution using lsof/fuser in local.stop if you don't like tmpwatch.

Aiken · Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2003 11:34 pm Post subject:

If I clean out /tmp with a script I do it early in the boot process. Try to get it clean before processes start putting their files in /tmp. (X, xfs, kde + others).

If it is just to keep the size of /tmp down I have found tmpwatch to be quite good. On the machine that I use tmpwatch on I have it deleting any files that have not been used after 24 hours.

On my machine I have /tmp mount as tmpfs. This way it is a ram disk and /tmp clean every time I boot. I got sick of X or kde not starting because of stale lock files or temporary files in /tmp. Having /tmp as a ram disk works very nicely for me.

dreamer3 · Guru Joined: 24 Sep 2002 Posts: 553