Files in /ud/tmp ??

[Tom Pellitieri]

While researching another problem, I discovered that there are a LOT of old files in the /ud/tmp folder on our AIX system.  Is it safe to delete these?  While the majority appear to be old Print files (why did they get stuck here??), there are a few "system-ish" files as well (e.g., sendmail.cf, inetd.conf)

Any documentation/ideas/thoughts out there?

--Tom

[precisonline]

Depends on how old they are.  A lot of junk gets written into /tmp and developers over the eons haven't helped by considering /tmp the global dumping ground.  I'd start maybe with something like this:

find /tmp -atime +30

This will show you the files that haven't been accessed in over 30 days.  With this list you could make a tarball of the files before you remove them, knowing that if anything got broken in the process you could bring it back from the tarball.  Then 30 days from now when you do it again, the tarball will show up in the list and you can remove it knowing that there's likely nothing there you need.

Another thought, I would want to be sure that there's a sendmail.cf and inetd.conf in /etc (which is where they're supposed to be).  My thought is that someone transferred the files to /tmp so they could download them for editing (which is one way to circumvent security on /etc); you could verify this by diff'ing the version in /tmp to the version in /etc.  Also look at the owner and perms of these "system-ish" files in /tmp; that might help identify who might have dropped them there.

[Tom Pellitieri]

Thanks for the suggestions, Kevin.

Please note that these files are not in /tmp, but in /ud/tmp (a directory I didn't know was used before this week!)

[precisonline]

Ah, my bad!  /ud/tmp is Unidata's temp directory.  Best way to get stuff out of there is simply to reboot Unidata with stopud/startud.

[Tom Pellitieri]

Hmm... we did a full reboot of the system on April 11, but there are files in /ud/tmp going back to January 2005 (which is about the time we started setting up the new box...)

I went ahead and deleted the obvious print jobs... I'll have to re-examine the rest (at least the larger files).

[precisonline]

Unidata has its own rules for what it does and/or does not remove when the system is restarted, but I would suspect anything dated before your last hard reboot would be safe to archive and delete.  I recommend customers reboot their Unidata at least monthly; we've seen free disk increase as much as 20% on a reboot with no other maintenance, and the system seems to be a lot faster and more stable when rebooted periodically.