[Gllug] Wiping free space.

[JLMS]

On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 12:29 AM, Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> wrote:
> On 29 Dec 2009, Alain Williams told this:
>> On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 04:08:49PM +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
>> If you don't know what is running, this will remove stuff more than 1 hour old:
>>
>>       find /var/tmp -mmin +60 | xargs rm -f
>
> My bete noire is sysadmins who do this sort of thing to /tmp or /var/tmp
> on multiuser systems. As an extreme case, I have seen (and written)
> packaging systems which allow every individual shell process to have its
> own set of installed packages (or at least binaries) by pointing $PATH
> through dynamically-created symlink farms in /tmp (pam_mount would help
> a bit here but it doesn't work very well on Solaris 8). Blow old stuff
> in /tmp away and suddenly half your binaries vanish out from under
> you...

In an emergency, when the machine is not working at all any way, one
is entirely justified to go to /tmp and remove stuff up, front and
centre if one has identified that the problem is related to the amount
of space available there.

As for /var/tmp it is less likely that things stop working if it fills
up, but once you get to know your systems, it may also be a
justifiable decision to clean up there as well.
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