would there be any danger in adding:

rm -Rvf /tmp/*

to my rc.local file, to clear out all the MBs of temp files at boot? if not, is there a better way to do it?

The better way to do it is to make it a cron job. I think that cron has a daily script(/etc/cron.daily) that monitors the /tmp directory and deletes things as necessary. Of course, your systems setup could be different so you may not have anything like that.

I do believe that Slackware already does this in its boot up scripts already. At least for some of the older releases, haven't checked 9.0 yet. Check your startup scripts as it might already remove everything in your /tmp folder at boot time.

i dont agree, you shouldnt delete things from tmp in multi user mode as you dont know what people/programs have put there and you could be deleteing important stuff. the fhs states that /tmp is not required to survive a reboot so emptying the contents at boot is a perfectly good time to do it, but do it before all your daemons start up. i think the best solution is to mount /tmp as tmpfs and thus it resides in ram and gets cleared every reboot but this is not a good idea if you dont have a lot of memory.

thanks for the responses guys.

trickykid: i'm using slack 9, and it does not seem to be automatically removing the temp files.

crashed: i like the cron job idea, but i don't see any scripts in the cron folders to keep track of /tmp folder stuff. could you post what your script looks like if you have one?

kev82: i definitely don't want to mount /tmp into memory. how else could i clear it before the daemons start?

btw, i'm in no hurry with this, it's just something i'd like to find out about. if i come across a recommended solution in rute or somewhere, i'll post it.

if you dont want /tmp in memory then go with your original idea. as i say its not really safe to remove the stuff with a cron job.

ok, thx.

I agree but you could just delete files over 2 days old or something. This should give you the best of both.

Instead of during startup you could do it during shutdown... In that case you'd surely not have to worry about it messing with your daemon's or anything like that.

Cool