Brian K. White said the following on 12/28/2009 01:44 AM:
I don't know of any especially official standard or practice that says a user mode app shall avoid using anything but one of the central */tmp directories for work files. There may be but I'm simply not addressing that part of the question since I have only my own opinion, not a definitive answer for it.
There are good reasons - apart from tradition - for using /tmp for temporary files instead of /home/<user>/tmp. Lets start with the fact that not all programs and scripts clean up after themselves so lets put them where a reaper program can clean them up periodically. Yes, in an idea world a program would open the temp file then unlink it so that it would be automagically cleared when the program exits or aborts, but not all programmers are that smart or that careful There are also some vulnerabilities that are exploited when the temporary files are on the same file system as an executable or library. (q.v.) Having /tmp as a separate file system that can be mounted 'noexec' and 'nosetuid' is a good idea. SymLinking each user's ~/tmp to /tmp or /tmp/<user> is one way to deal with some classes of 'broken' programs. If your problem is really to do with backing up open and size-changing files, then that is another matter. It seems pretty pointless to me since the relevance of the working file will depend on the state of the program executing that is using it, and that program's state - core image - is not being preserved synchronously with the working file, and hence the working file need not be part of the backup set. Either exclude /home/*/tmp or use the Symlink and don't follow it when backing up. -- "Ahhh. A man with a sharp wit. Someone ought to take it away from him before he cuts himself." - Peter da Silva -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org