No space left on the device

batev · 05-24-2006, 01:17 AM

I have Slack 10.2 on a 6 GB partition. My /tmp directory is always filling up. Today I could not start the distro in runlevel 4 - it just stuck when trying to start the X11 manager. I had to manually delete everything from the /tmp directory and now I have more than a GB free disk space.
I also cannot copy a 3 GB file from a dvd to another partition - is the information always first going through the /tmp directory?
How can I make the system perform self clean-up of the /tmp directory?

MS3FGX · 05-24-2006, 02:11 AM

That is pretty odd, I don't know why it would fill /tmp up so quickly.

To clear the files in /tmp, you could add something like "rm -rf /tmp/*" to your boot scripts.

drkstr · 05-24-2006, 02:09 PM

You might also want to consider setting up a partition that mounts to the '/tmp ' directory. This way if it fills up you will not get a system failure.

regards,
...drkstr

tuxdev · 05-24-2006, 02:14 PM

If you have lots of memory to burn for something, you could try setting up your /tmp as tmpfs.

Alien Bob · 05-24-2006, 02:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by batev

My /tmp directory is always filling up.

When you delete the files in /tmp manually, do you also check what you delete? Having so much piling up in /tmp is not a good sign IMO - are processes constantly crashing, do you abort many downloads, stuff like that? Web browsers will download to /tmp for instance and only copy the downloaded file to the location you specified after 100% completion.

Quote:

I also cannot copy a 3 GB file from a dvd to another partition - is the information always first going through the /tmp directory?

What do you use to copy? Not the "cp" command I gues... The GUI programs will often use /tmp as intermediary, too.

Eric

dracolich · 05-24-2006, 02:19 PM

If your /tmp is on the same partition as /var then it might actually be your log files that's filling up and not /tmp. Once, on my laptop, my syslog and messages files were growing above 50MB each. To change that I created a cron job to rotate them more often.

batev · 05-25-2006, 02:40 AM

Thanks guys. I have not noticed often crashing processes on my system. Moreover I'm trying to keep myself from touching too much settings - so almost everything on my system is as it is by default. I also use cp for copying and I have the same problem with it