Bug#764472: cups creates millions of temporary files when printing

[Brian Potkin <claremont102@gmail.com>]

Hello Antonio,

Thank you for your report. The first thing to say is that this is very
likely not to be a bug in cups. Please see

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups/+bug/890705

and

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=581748

So - do you have acroread installed?


On Wed 08 Oct 2014 at 14:04:46 +0200, Antonio Sartori wrote:

> When trying to print (tried twice from evince, not tested from other
> software), cups creates millions of symbolic links in /tmp to the ppd
> driver in /etc/cups/ppd. The names of the symbolic links are similar
> to 54351da228fae.

Millions of links would imply lots of printing taking place and not just
twice. Is that the case? Also, does it occur with other applications? We
really need to track down under what circumstances the files are created
and why they are not deleted by the application.
 
> This causes the system to hang on the next reboot while systemd tries
> to empty the tmp folder, making the system unbootable.

Do you mean it hangs indefinitely and the machine has to powered off to
be restarted?

> Notice that deleting the files by hand is tricky, since they are too
> many (rm does not work, it is not even possible to list the files with
> ls), I don't know how to do this. For now, I rebooted the system using
> a live dist and I typed mv /tmp /tmp2. This enables the system to boot
> again. Help on how I can delete the folder tmp2 would also be
> appreciated.

I'm surprised 'ls -l' doesn't work. Is there any error message? What
about 'ls -l | head'.

'rm -r /tmp2' should delete /tmp2.

Regards,

Brian.