Re: /.cache directory
On Fri, Oct 03, 2025 at 04:48:20 -0400, Karl Vogel wrote:
> >> On Fri 03 Oct 2025 at 02:59:47 (-0400), Avinash Sonawane wrote:
> > Over the coming weekend I'm planning to install Debian again. This time
> > I'll be using debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso. What can I do to catch the
> > culprit in/after the action?
I'm not sure it's really viable to catch it in action unless you do
the installation in a virtual environment, and you can set some sort of
traps/breakpoints to trigger when a specific node (subdirectory in this
case) is created. More on this below.
> As soon as you can login as root, see if /.cache exists. If it's already
> there, run find to get the modtime for everything:
>
> find / -printf "%T+ %p\n" | sort > /tmp/TOC
That won't hurt, I guess.
> If it's not there, do one install step at a time and start a shell
> whenever you can. If it's not there but shows up after you've been at
> multiuser for awhile, get the timestamp and see if anything's in your
> cronlog or syslog.
We're fairly certain it's occurring during the step where all of the
selected task packages are installed, unpacked and configured, and
that it only occurs if a Desktop Environment task has been selected.
Another thing that one might try here would be to do only the Standard
installation (no Desktop Environment), then reboot into the system
normally, then set up your inotify traps or whatever, and then
"finish" the installation by running tasksel and choosing your
Desktop Environment. It's worth finding out whether this gives the
same result (I'm guessing it does, but nobody has reported trying it).
If you can figure out a good way to discover the creator of a node
during all that chaos, then you'll have the answer you want.
Unfortunately, this is where my knowledge begins to fall short. I can't
see anything in inotifywait(1) or inotify(7) that gives you the *process*
which is responsible for the event -- only the time when it occurs.
I see a "pid" field in the result structure in fanotify(7), so maybe
you could write a C program using the fanotify interface, get the pid
when the event occurs, and very quickly look up the pid's command name
and so forth, hoping you catch it in time.
In fact... it looks like there's some example C code in the fanotify(7)
man page which does this. I'd need to test it to see whether it
actually works, and could be a viable way to proceed. I wonder why
this isn't already built and distributed as a tool....
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