Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997 16:07:20 -0500 (EST) From: Evan Champion <evanc@synapse.net> To: Steve Price <sprice@hiwaay.net> Cc: freebsd-bugs@hub.freebsd.org Subject: Re: misc/5054: /tmp not nuked on reboot Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971115155932.9762J-100000@cello.synapse.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.96.971115144908.6026B-100000@fly.HiWAAY.net>
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On Sat, 15 Nov 1997, Steve Price wrote: > I guess that is a matter of preference really. I personally don't > clear /tmp on any of my machines, preferring to clean them manually. > I keep alot of stuff that I don't want toasted in /tmp and since > power outtages seem to happen frequently around here and I don't have > a UPS (yet) 'cleaning /tmp' is of no use to me. That doesn't mean > it is not the right thing to do in certain circumstances as I am > sure you can attest. I would guess that the premise is that having > to reboot a machine is a very infrequent occurrence (at least with > anything not MSoft that is) and doing this as a cron job will allow > the system administrator to choose the frequency with which cleanings > of /tmp occur and not leave it up to fate or some other ill-fated > reason. That's what /var/tmp is supposed to be for. The basis behind /tmp and /var/tmp is that /tmp is for very transient stuff that you don't care if it is lost during a reboot or by an auto-cleaner. This is why /tmp is often put on a tmpfs. /var/tmp is for stuff that is meant to be kept around, but is still temporary in nature. For example, a lot of programs core dump to /var/tmp. /var/tmp is never auto-cleaned nor purged on reboot. That is also why it is a very bad idea to symlink /tmp to /var/tmp. Instead, make /tmp a separate filesystem (tmpfs or otherwise), or symlink it to /usr/tmp. That's the way it's been with BSD for as long as I remember. It was like that at least with SunOS 4 if not earlier, and certainly has always been the case on BSD/OS. Evan
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