On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 09:48:40AM +0200, jdd wrote:

Le 02/09/2010 23:47, jc a écrit :

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On Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:46:05 +0200, jdd wrote:

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Hello,

I just noticed that the variable TMPDIR=/tmp is set in my 11.3 install (and not by me).

This can cause problems when untaring big archives, the /tmp directory may not be able to cope with multigigabytes (dvd or videos) files.

Is there a big reason for this to be set?

It's just the default value. A value has to be set,

why :-)

/tmp and /var/tmp are cleaned up by a cron job IIRC and all data not belonging to root get purged. Well, /etc/sysconfig/cron:MAX_DAYS_IN_TMP defaults to 0 which disables this feature. In /etc/sysconfig/cron you can also see that /tmp and /var/tmp are handled different. Better: It's possible to handle them different. See the comment to LONG_TMP_DIRS_TO_CLEAR

and /tmp is the

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convention. You can change it through your environment variables. If you do, I wouldn't remove the old directory, as some programs may have it hard-coded.

I simply moved the folder to a bigger place and made a symlink, but I had to spend some time debugging :-(

And what is your suggestion to improve the situation? Or why are you discussiong this issue on the factory list? Is this a "Fix it! Make me happy!" request? What we expect here is a suggestion to enhance the situation. I see several ways to address this: a) Ignore your complain as the current approach works well since many years. b) Use a sub dir of the user e.g. ~/.tmp/ as default Disadvantage: a simple cleanup of central tmp directories like it is currently possible will fail. c) The particular admin running into this issue creates an extra tmp at some place in the file system with enough space, adjusts the permissions and adds a bind mount from /some/big/disk/tmp to /tmp to the fstab. Disadvantage: bind mounts are ignored while upgrades IIRC. A dude more deeper in YaST will know better. I believe c) is the way to go. Please document it and file a submit request to Factory. Lars -- Lars Müller [ˈlaː(r)z ˈmʏlɐ] Samba Team SUSE Linux, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany