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Re: what is flooding /var/tmp?



On Thu, 25 Nov 2021, Marc Auslander wrote:

On 11/24/2021 10:40 PM, sp007@caiway.net wrote:
Hello,

My /var/tmp directory gets flooded by big files named:

sort01ei1t
sort01Eq7u
sort01sLAs
...
sortzZZtvv


the files are approx. 13 Gb each.
In 24 hours > 6000 are written.

My big partition is filled by it until the system freezes.

The files are plain text files, containing sshfs paths:

/mnt/nas/sshfs/proc/self/task/413551/root/proc/self/task/413551/root/proc/self/task/413551/root/proc/self/task/413551/root/proc/
.........

nas and desktop are running debian 11 daily updated.

How can I find out which program is writing these files?

Thanks!

You might look at file creation time and look in /var/log/syslog to see what CRON job is running when they are created.

But >6000 in 24hrs suggests one every 10s which doesn't sound like cron.
Sounds more like something stuck in a loop and aborting/retrying.

To the OP, have you checked ps for any jobs that have been running for
unexpectedly long?

Is a reboot a possibility (or already tried)?

The content of the files looks odd too, something is following links on
a remote /proc. Is the file one huge line or many lines (of max path
length whatever that is, I'm not sure - 4k?)

Do you even need to export/mount the proc filesystem like this - is
there some way you can stop that happening?

I don't use it but locate, or some tool like that, might be trying to
build an index of /proc - which I'd assume would be avoided on a local
/proc but might need some config magic for a remote one.

If nothing else, is it possible to bind mount an empty directory over
/mnt/nas/sshfs/proc and see if that helps?




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