can /tmp/SBo content safely be deleted
 

Hi all,

After installing numerous stuff on my Slackware system, I notice I am running out of hard-drive space. I see that /tmp/SBo has about 1G of staff that I recently installed --- may I safely delete this staff?

Cheers,
IDD

Sure you can. Maybe you'd like to save the .tgz packages for the future, but the /tmp/SBo folder you can remove - it's where the sources are unpacked and programs compiled and installed with DESTDIR. Take a look at some SlackBuild script and you'll see what are those.

Yes you may! You can delete everything in /tmp if you really want to. Whatever the operating system actually requires the kernel will make again.

Thanks for the guide --- now I have got that 1G space back.

Opinions vary about the best way to clean /tmp and none of them are guaranteed to cause no breakage. I remove everything in /tmp as soon as the file system containing it is mounted; this by modifying the boot script which mounts it; works for me; YMMV.

Hi catkin,

you say, "by modifying the boot script which mounts" /tmp. Which is the boot script you are referring to (is it /boot/config ?), and how did you modify it?

Ummm ... no, you can't, you shouldn't. Many apps, including X11,
have temporary files in /tmp for users CURRENT sessions. Deleting
those can make "bad things" happen. It's safe to delete OLD stuff
from /tmp, things that aren't currently being accessed.



Cheers,
Tink

On Slackware it's /etc/rc.d/rc.S. When /tmp is on the / file system, the relevant part is just after comment "# Remount the root file system in read-write mode" which is mostly an if-fi to deal with it failing. I use this line after the closing fi: ( cd /tmp && rm -rf -- * .* 2>/dev/null )

I delete everything in /tmp when the system shuts down by adding the following to /etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown:

+1 to all of Tinkster's post. Regards the quote above, the potential gotcha is that even old files and directories may be in use. This is a topic that has been much debated and, as I posted earlier, there are no guaranteed safe solutions. Prior discussions on LQ listed here.

I decided against that solution in favour of doing it during boot because rc.[06] runs rc.local_shutdown early so before shutting down many other things which _might_ depend on files+directories in /tmp including MySQL, Apache, Samba, NFS server, ssh (which does use /tmp), SASL, LDAP, D-bus, networked file systems, networking, process accounting, ACPI, quotas (which does use /tmp?) ...

Thanks. Never thought of that.

After adding in /etc/rc.d/rc.S after the line and then rebooting, I now have 4G of space. Wow, I needed space like cracy --- thanks!

I shy away from the .* wildcard because I've always though it'd expand to '..'. I tend to use .??* which forces the wildcard to expand to at least three characters (thereby omitting '..'). It still catches most dot-files: only those whose file name is fewer than three characters long don't get deleted. I have yet to come across such a file.

Safer to use in case rc.S needs to have a specific current working directory (AFAIK it doesn't but best to play safe).

And it should go after the fi after not directly after it (because the / file system has been mounted read-write then -- surprising that it worked for you!).