cleaning /tmp directory

[Tim]

On Wed, 2010-03-31 at 15:58 +0200, Adalbert Prokop wrote:
> There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Fedora comes with tmpwatch, 
> which does exactly what you want - scans /tmp (and possibly other 
> directories) and deletes unused files.

Not quite...  It will delete not recently looked at files, whether you
actually used them or not.  It's an important distinction, here's why:

If you do something like list the contents of /tmp in Nautilus or
Konqueror, or use any indexing thingy that looks through /tmp, you've
just /read/ those files again, and reset the timeout.  Do that often
enough, and tmpwatch will never clear out those files.

I've been careful to avoid doing any of that, and still find /very/ old
files in the /tmp directory.  I still haven't found out what's doing it.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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