Lynn David Newton wrote:

>   Joe> How temporary is /tmp? 
> 
> /tmp is permanent. The stuff in it isn't.
> 			      
>   Joe>			      I've downloaded Firefox
>   Joe> twice (both times into /tmp) to play around with
>   Joe> it and both times (next day) when I went back it
>   Joe> was gone. Is there something running (debian)
>   Joe> that gets rid of anything in /tmp or am I just
>   Joe> loosing it?
> 
> Have you been rebooting between downloads? It's been
> years since I've looked closely at that, but the usual
> process on Unix systems I've dealt with (many) is to
> delete everything in /tmp when a system is rebooted. 
> 
> Directories and files with names that start with '.' 
> (dot) are not removed, just ordinary files. So if you
> put it in a subdirectory in /tmp it should still be
> there between boots.
> 
> Or put it in /var/tmp. As far as I know, that stuff is
> not touched between boots.
> 
> I've never looked to see where this is done. It's not
> cron, as someone else suggested. Unless your system has
> a specal process in place to keep /tmp cleaned up.
> 
> Generally, it's not a good idea to put anything in /tmp
> that you want to stay around. That's why they call it
> tmp (temporary) after all.
> 
I should try to keep my mouth shut a bit more often, or at least do a 
little more research before spouting off.

After reading Lynn's nice narrative, I looked through cron (FC3) and 
didn't find anything that's cleaning up /tmp that frequently. There is, 
however a script called tmpwatch in /etc/cron.daily/ that invokes 
/usr/sbin/tmpwatch to clean up files in various directories, including 
/tmp. It's set to delete only files that are more than 240 hours old in 
/tmp though. Your distro might vary. See man "tmpwatch".

A handy little command to find all references to "tmp" in your cron 
directories is:
find /etc/cron* -name "*" -exec grep -H tmp {} \;

BTW, I also rebooted, and no /tmp files were apparently deleted.

BL, it's not a good idea to put your files in /tmp. That's not what it's 
there for. /home is where the heart is. ;)
-- 
-Eric 'shubes'
"There is no such thing as the People;
  it is a collectivist myth.
  There are only individual citizens
  with individual wills
  and individual purposes."
-William E. Simon (1927-2000),
     Secretary of the Treasury (1974-1977)
  "A Time For Truth" (1978), pg. 237

 
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