>> Traditionally, it's so /tmp doesn't grow without bound, [...] > What processes leave data in /tmp?
I'm relatively well-placed to speak to that, since one of the first things I do is disable all automated deletion from /tmp, cron and boot-time both. Looking at the machine with the largest /tmp, I see 1477 things, practically all of which is stuff I manually put there. As for automated (or at least probably-automated) stuff, I see - 10 files that look like compiler temporaries (ccXXXXX.i and .s). - 4 files gs_*, which aren't clear to me (ghostscript?). - 3 files mkdep*, presumably from mkdep. - 3 files vi.*, presumably from vi. - config-guess-602, a directory left over from some kind of config. There usually are more config-guess-* directories, but them I recently cleaned out. This is years of accumulation. The timestamps on those, year portion only, show 2004 (x1), 2005 (x7), 2006 (x5), 2007 (x1), 2008 (x1), 2010 (x5), and 2011 (x1). The rate at which this stuff appears is low enough that it could actually all be explained by stuff being left behind on crashes. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
