I don’t like unconditionally clearing /tmp on boot, since I’m invariably working on something in there when my system locks up. But I do like /tmp getting cleaned up from time to time. As a compromise, I’ve set TMPTIME=7 in /etc/default/rcS so that only stuff older than 7 days is deleted when I reboot.
© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
I make /tmp be in RAM with tmpfs.
Comment by Joseph — March 10, 2010 @ 6:03 pm
Yikes, I can’t retain 7 days of files with a tmpfs. ;)
Comment by kees — March 10, 2010 @ 6:14 pm
Isn’t that what /var/tmp is for?
(a random copy of the fs hierarchy standard)
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.2/fhs-5.15.html
Comment by John Eikenberry — March 10, 2010 @ 7:26 pm
I use tmpreaper rather than something that happens at boot, since how often I reboot my system tends not to have much to do with how often I want /tmp cleaned.
Comment by Russ Allbery — March 10, 2010 @ 7:48 pm
I really enjoy doing important work in /tmp, it gives my job a daredevil feel that i’ll lose work if the box crashes. :)
Comment by Dave Walker (Daviey) — March 11, 2010 @ 6:14 am
I used to use TMPTIME but it delayed the boot process for many many seconds (also had some issues with relatime, nodiratime and TMPTIME). Now I use /var/tmp for stuff I want to preserve and mount a ramfs on /tmp.
Comment by Raphael Geissert — March 11, 2010 @ 6:04 pm
I enjoy the feeling of bliss a clean /tmp gives me after reboot.
Comment by Rathernot — March 11, 2010 @ 7:50 pm