Re: /tmp accidentally filled

[Don Armstrong <don@debian.org>]

On Thu, 04 Dec 2008, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Lisi Reisz (lisi.reisz@gmail.com):
> > Here's another simpleton question. :-(
> > 
> > I managed to backup onto my / partition.  I have rm-ed most of the resulting 
> > garbage.  But I am left with a 100% full /tmp and df tells me that this is 
> 
> Most comments in that thread lead you to the correct conclusions that:
> 
> - filling up /tmp is not good
> - blindly destroying files in /tmp is not good (desktop envs keep data
> and sockets there)

[lots of other good reasons why /tmp matters]

These are all reasons why you may want to consider setting TMPDIR; I
personally have the following in my ~/.bashrc:

    if [ ! -e ~/tmp ]; then
        mkdir ~/tmp;
    fi;
    export TMPDIR="$(echo ~/tmp)";

Something similar may also be useful (/home is the largest partition
on most of my machines, and coupled with tmpreaper in anacron/crontab
works reasonably, though tmpreaper has its own "issues"). [This also
has the added benifit of avoiding tempfile race conditions.]


Don Armstrong

-- 
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