tmpreaper: keep your temp files under control
November 22nd, 2009 edited by TinchoArticle submitted by JP Vossen. DebADay needs you more than ever! Please submit good articles about software you like!
The tmpreaper utility will clean out your temporary file directories by recursively removing files that haven’t been accessed in some amount of time. You can configure exclusions and it will not dive into symlinks, or remove symlinks, sockets, FIFOs, or special files unless specifically told to.
However, the package description contains this:
WARNING: Please do not run `tmpreaper’ on `/’. There are no protections against this written into the program, as that would prevent it from functioning the way you’d expect it to in a `chroot(8)’ environment.
After you install the package, you need to manually edit /etc/tmpreaper.conf and remove or comment the SHOWWARNING=true line to actually active it. Also review the settings in that file.
At least some versions of Ubuntu, and possibly Debian, do not install tmpreaper by default. I assume that is in accordance with the “principle of least surprise” but this policy may bother system administrators familiar with Red Hat or other systems where /tmp is automatically cleaned out by default. Note that /tmp and other directories are still cleaned at boot-time by the default /etc/init.d/bootclean (Debian) or /etc/init.d/*-bootclean.sh (Ubuntu) scripts.
The Red Hat and derivatives equivalent is ‘tmpwatch’ and is installed by default on those systems.
The tmpreaper package has been available in Debian since Etch, and in Ubuntu since Dapper.