Controlling clearance of /tmp on Linux systems
Published on 19th June 2015 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutesWhile some may view the behaviour in a less favourable, I always have liked the way that Linux can clear its /tmp
directory every time the system is restarted. The setting for this is in /etc/default/rcS
and the associated line looks something like:
TMPTIME=0
The value of 0 means that the directory is flushed completely every time the system is restarted, but there are other options. A setting of -1 makes the directory behave like any other one on the system, where any file deletions are manual affairs. Using other positive integer values like 7 will specify the number of days that a file can stay in /tmp
before it is removed.
What brought me to this topic was the observation that my main Linux Mint system was accumulating files in /tmp
and the cause was the commenting out of the TMPTIME=0
line in /etc/default/rcS
. This is not the case on Ubuntu, and using that is how I got accustomed to automatic file removal from /tmp
in the first place.
All of this discussion so far has pertained to PC's where systems are turned off or restarted regularly. Things are different for servers of course and I have seen tools like tmpreaper
and tmpwatch
being given a mention. As if to prove that there is more than one way to do anything on Linux, shell scripting and cron
remain an ever present fallback.