Andrey Rakhmatullin <w...@debian.org> writes: > On Mon, May 06, 2024 at 10:40:00AM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
>> I'm not sure if we have software on long running servers which place >> files in /tmp and /var/tmp and expect files to not be deleted during >> runtime, even if not accessed for a long time. This is certainly an >> issue to be aware of and keep an eye on. > Note that FHS mandates it for /var/tmp: "Files and directories located > in /var/tmp must not be deleted when the system is booted. Although data > stored in /var/tmp is typically deleted in a site-specific manner, it is > recommended that deletions occur at a less frequent interval than /tmp." It mandates that it not be cleaned on *boot*. Not that it never be cleaned during runtime. It anticipates that it be cleaned periodically, just less frequently than /tmp. There is a specific prohibition against clearing /var/tmp on reboot because /var/tmp historically has been used to store temporary files whose whole reason for existence is that they need to survive a reboot, such as vi recover files, but are still safe to delete periodically. Historically, deleting anything in /var/tmp that hadn't been accessed in over seven days was a perfectly reasonable and typical configuration. These days, we have the complication that it's fairly common to turn off atime updates for performance reasons, which makes it a bit harder to implement that policy when /var/tmp isn't its own partition and thus inherits that setting from the rest of the system. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
