Feature changed by: Jean-Daniel Dodin (jdd) Feature #307510, revision 9 Title: Cron: set MAX_DAYS_IN_TMP different from 0 openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Ricardo Gabriel Berlasso (rgbsuse) Description: By default, openSUSE set MAX_DAYS_IN_TMP and MAX_DAYS_IN_LONG_TMP to zero, which means /tmp and /var/tmp folders are never cleaned. New users do not know of this, and after a while their hard drives ends with a lot of “garbage”. People who need those files not to be removed for sure will know how to change this default value but many people who don't need those files will not know about them until a “disk full” warning appears. This is particularly true for netbooks and old computer with small drives. My proposal is to set cron defaults to periodically clean the /tmp and /var/tmp folders. Discussion: #1: Robert Davies (robopensuse) (2009-12-01 01:05:28) Agreed! Once with SuSE 8.2 I installed a machine for someone using it offsite, and I missed to change that; because /tmp was never cleared up sometimes login would fail, and it would fail strangely, and not in such a way that had me checking /tmp, so it was only when I got the machine back I noticed. Personally deleting files with policy something like, not accessed for 7 days, and that are older than 28 days in /tmp; or 1 month & 3 months in /var/tmp would be very conservative defaults, yet reduce maintenance for the "oblivious". #2: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) (2009-12-30 19:46:21) If it was not for tmpfs having a limited storage amount, I would simply mount a tmpfs onto /tmp. (Hey, IIRC, Solaris does that.) So yes, I too, agree here, to set the clean interval to non-zero. #3: Axel Braun (docb) (2010-02-08 17:29:56) Good idea, I'm tired of changing this all the time! +1 + #4: Jean-Daniel Dodin (jdd) (2010-05-02 16:56:23) + I just had the problem. 6+Gb in /tmp!!! The only thing I can se that + could cause the problem was a dvd dl with mozilla. I let it yesterday + night and on the morning couldn't find any result anywhere. I beg the + partition filled and aborted the dl, but didn't remove the partial + file. Don't know how to make apps *don't* use /tmp for such heavy job. + May be it's not this, I had very restricted acces to the computer at + the moment, so I removed all in /tmp and can't investigate more :-(. + I use to make MAX_DAYS_IN_TMP = 7 + at least a warning mail should be nice. Here, it's a "startx" error + message that said "no place in /tmp" that made me find the clue -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/307510