NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/comp/unix/question/12951

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-05 | 1.6 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!netxcom!jwc
From: [e-mail] (Jeffrey W. Comer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Monitoring /tmp
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 5 Nov 92 17:36:53 GMT
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: The Chaos Bobs
Lines: 30

[e-mail] (Peter Steele) writes:
>I was wondering if other sites have this kind of problem, where
>students will copy large files into /tmp and leave them their so
>their friends can copy them to their accounts. Their reasoning
>is that this is simpler than setting the files up as public in
>their own accounts, plus it doesn't take away from their quotas.
>I don't like this practice as it fills up /tmp and could possibly
>cause a program requiring legitimate use of /tmp to fail due to
>lack of space. Has anyone got any suggestions on how to prevent
>this sort of abuse of the /tmp directory? I can think of one
>simple solution: A global .logout that executes:
>
>    find /tmp -user $user -exec rm {} \;
>
>but that has some potential problems...

Well you could always reboot every day.... q;-> Seriously, here at my
company we have a cron job called prune that runs once a day. It reads
an input file, into which you can enter filenames (/etc/?tmp for example)
or directories (/tmp). After each name, you can have prune remove a file
if it grows beyond a certain size (in k-bytes) or it hasn't been updated
after x days. It's very effective, except that you can always defeat it
by touching your files.

E-Mail me for details.

And yes, we also have this problem, not just in /tmp, but in ALL filesys-
tems.

-jc