What is all this stuff in /home/joe/tmp ??

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, Josef Lowder wrote:
> What is all this garbage in my /home/joe/tmp directory?

Dunno.  I've never had a ~/tmp dir AFAICT.

> And why does it not get flushed out when I reboot?

The system generally cleans out /tmp , not ~/tmp/ .  If you want to flush 
~/tmp on boot, you can add that to your distro's equivalent 
of /etc/conf.d/local.start , and it'll happen.

[some snippage]
> -rw-rw-r--  1 joe  joe   8474 Feb 12 14:11 Release.stw
> drwx------  2 joe  joe   4096 Apr  2 10:50 kde-joe/
> drwx------  2 joe  joe   4096 Apr  2 12:11 ksocket-joe/
> drwx------  2 joe  joe   8192 Apr  2 12:20 orbit-joe/

This is a little odd.  I have some similar dirs, but they're all in /tmp .

> In particular, the two "orbit" directories have a lot of apparently empty
> files in there, for example orbit-joe has all these files with dates two
> years back: 
>
> srwxrwxr-x  1 joe joe   0 Aug 15  2006 linc-10fa-0-62b063a83c09
[snippage]

These are sockets, probably used by various programs to connect to the CORBA 
thing that's running.  Any time the CORBA server starts up, it *probably* 
creates a new socket.  The buildup here is mostly due to the temp dir not 
being cleaned out periodically.  The good news is that the sockets aren't 
taking up any disk space, just inodes.  However, it'd be a good idea to find 
out why your temp dir isn't being cleaned out and make it so that it does get 
cleaned out every so often.


-- 
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Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see