Is it OK to delete everything in /tmp?
 

well I've got slackware 10.0 on my computer..

I'm pretty tight for disk space, and I noticed that the /tmp directory had about 120mb of stuff in it.

Is it ok to delete EVERYTHING in the /tmp directory or is there some stuff I need to leave behind?

Cheers
Forrest

Re: Is it OK to delete everything in /tmp?
 

Yes, you can remove everything in /tmp. A (the?) proper way to do this is to login as root, then to switch to single user mode with the init 1 command and to use the following commands to create a sane /tmp hierarchy :

You can then reboot if you wish or you can switch back to multi-user mode with the init 4 command.

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LiNuCe

Personally, I avoid the issue altogether and run a 'tmpfs', i.e: a ramdisk which is mounted under /tmp at bootup. Don't have to worry about deleting stuff this way - it goes away when I shutdown the computer.

Refer to /path/to/kernel/source/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt for more info.

Another interesting reading before switching to tmpfs is this article published by IBM.

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LiNuCe

The change to 'tmpfs' will only be permanent if you want it to be. Try it. If it degrades your system performance, switch back. Simple.

In ~ 4 years (or however long its been since tmpfs came out) I've not experienced the problems discussed in the IBM article. But then I like to load my mobos with all the RAM they can carry.

That's not a bad idea with tmpfs... I just append to the startup script. When it cleans /var/lock, I have it wipe /tmp as well. Those required sockets seem to get created automatically.

Well thanks for all the help..

I'm guessing it would be OK to add something like "rm -rf /tmp" to the shutdown script?

Oh and I don't think I'll use the tmpfs thing, I've only got 128mb ram

I run KDE. In my rc.local, I run two scripts:

#!/bin/bash
# /usr/local/sbin/deleteoldfiles
# delete old tmp files

echo "Deleting old tmp files."
TMPDIRS="/tmp /var/tmp" # list of directories to clean
for d in $TMPDIRS; do
find $d ! -type d -mtime +10 -exec rm -f {} \;
find $d -type d -mtime +10 -exec rmdir {} \;
done

#!/bin/bash
# /usr/local/sbin/cleanup
# delete various tmp files

echo "Deleting various tmp files."
# first delete known single files
rm -f /tmp/.ICE-unix/* /tmp/kio*
# next delete files recursively
rm -rf /tmp/kde-root/* /tmp/kde-username/* /tmp/kde-tester/* /tmp/.wine*

# Delete login manager logs for easier session troubleshooting and maintenance
rm -f /var/log/kdm.log >/dev/null
rm -f /var/log/xdm.log >/dev/null
# rm -f /var/log/gdm.log >/dev/null

The ideas for the scripts are not original. I saw what some other people have done and simply adopted the ideas. I hope this helps.

I think it should be safe to replace the following line :with the following ones in the /etc/rc.d/rc.6 shutdown script :--
LiNuCe

Or you could have a cron script for cleaning up /tmp, something like:

The above would find all regular files not accessed in three days and remove them. It's better than shutdown/startup script solution since it will also work if you keep your box powered up.

I like that even better... I've gotten in the habit of never using /tmp to store stuff, but you never know. You could build a new mozilla package and then forget to remove it before a reboot. Then you'd have to spend another hour building the package...

Nice suggestion aliendog.

The traditional pratice is to assume that temporary files in /tmp/ are removed between system reboots, whereas temporary files in /var/tmp/ are not . So, if you want to keep temporary files between reboots, you would probably store them in /var/tmp/. By default, Slackware Linux does not remove temporary files in /tmp/ between reboots, however many Unix/Linux systems remove them (or store them in a temporary filesystem such as tmpfs). Note that you can ignore this traditional pratice on your system until Slackware Linux uses tmpfs for /tmp/ by default, but this is something to know to avoid problems on others systems.

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LiNuCe