Deleted some /tmp/ files. I now have problems
 

Hi,

I am an idiot.

I am staying in germany with some friends of the family while doing a language course and I reeaaaaly needed to use their computer.

So I was watching some streaming video on their acer which runs 10.x openSUSE. I restart and I can't log in. Panic, log on to the windows partition and find out that this is probably because the partition does not have enough space. So I log in the console and use this code

cd /tmp/ (enter)

rm * - and hold down enter for a little while.

First time all is fine I have just done it the second time and things are fucking up a bit. Many error messages in german, can't save OoO documents properly. A message in english telling me my gecko configuration is not working properly (or something.) This laptop has to be in pristing condition by the time they get back, I have found the installation disks but I can't delete their files or accounts.

The code I used, did it delete general files that aren't in temp!? Or are these error messages random and unrelated to my actions

Thank you for your kind advice

Joe

Nothing in /tmp should be expected to survive a reboot. Some distros will wipe /tmp on a reboot by default, some won't. I don't think openSUSE does - look in /etc/sysconfig/cron
Running 'rm *' in /tmp shouldn't cause any problems because all * will match is files in tmp and stuff in /tmp is, well temporary. I'd use 'rm -rf *' as root in /tmp. But make sure you're in /tmp :) Or set /tmp to be cleared at boot using /etc/sysconfig/cron (run suseconfig after editing - suseconfig isn't right, it's that but some of the letters are uppercase but I can't remember which and am not near a SUSE box.0

Did you run 'rm *' as root or a regular user?

Is /home on the same partition as /tmp? Maybe /home is on it's own partition and that is full?

Thanks, you are helping me calm my nerves

Well my username wasn't root, I logged in as evelyn but I'm not sure if she has root access. I'm not going to mess with suseconfig because I don't want to do any permanent. again I can't log in, am going to wipe it again. How do you find out how much space is left?

How would I find that out? Is it possible that Vista and Linux are on the same partition? according to vista their are 2 hard drives (I'm guessing they are virtual) and one of them only has a couple hundred megs left. Maybe if I remove some windows crap I wouldn't have to go rooting through the temp folder.

You might be better off just confessing that you screwed something up, and remain a welcome friend.

If you loose their data or system configuration because of a botched installation, you're likely to be in worse shape. Please leave their system alone if you don't know what you're doing... which seems apparent.

Just explain what happened, and the owner can (hopefully) resolve the issues by logging in as root.

Yeah, what MR C said. Don't mess with someone else's machine unless you're totally sure you know what you're doing. No offence, but if since you don't know how to tell whether /tmp is on the same partition as /home then you're out of your depth and could easily make things even worse. If they've managed to set up their machine to dual boot Linux and Vista then they should be able to sort out what ever has happened.

On normal system every trouble you can get from deleting files in /tmp/ should disappear after system reboot (at least, on my distribution). There are bunch of files in /tmp (kde stores several sockets here, for example) that are needed by working system, but they should be recreated automatically after either system reboot, logoff/logon or restarting X.

No.

Mr.C's advice is eminently sensible but these people are not good with computers at all, their friend set it up who lives a few hundred miles away. Also, in more knowledgable times I dual booted fedora using grub, I don't remember it being that difficult. What I'm going to do is clear temp (I ls'd it, loads of pdfs in their and other useless items) then get in, clear all my files out. Then post my sucess here and return the computer to its hiding place. If things do fuck up I can always take it in for repair before they get back.

Thank you!

So not only are you willing to screw their system up, you're also willing to give their system with its private data to some repair shop!

For shame, the lack of sensibility and ethics!

remind me never to loan you a computer.

Looks like you are headed down the primrose path. I do hope the owners have backups; looks like they're gonna need them.

If all you did was delete the contents of /tmp, a reboot should clean things up.

Phew, crisis averted. Emptied what i could of temp, It has half a gig of large jpegs belonging to another user which I couldn't delete. This is pretty massive since they've only allocated 5.9 gigs to the linux partition which is 99% full. No error messages managed to recover half of the document i was working on

People hand their computers to private repair shops all the time, I'm sure they've seen all the private data in the world and have stopped caring about all the nudie photos. Its not so unethical to pay someone to fix someone elses computer.

Thank you all for your time and Ich bin glücklich ich hatte glück, awful german I know

The key word here is "their" - people can make their OWN choice. You taking another's system is not their OWN choice, but YOUR choice. I'm sure you know the difference, but rationalization has clouded your eyes.

Some years ago, a shop that I occasionally did business with (I did some design and deployments for them) took in a customer's computer for repair. Apparently they found some images on the machine that were - let us say - not legal. IIRC, it was some nudes of children.

They turned the owner in to the police, and there was a big stink about it. Not in defense of the owner; what he was doing apparently was execrable. The problem was that apparently beyond just fixing the guy's machine, they were rooting around on it.

I never did business with them again, and I told the owner of the business why.

The point here is that it isn't YOUR computer. Were you to mess my machine up, then try to undo it by giving it to yet someone ELSE to "fix"...well...you might survive the experience, but only if you ran fast enough.