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Temporary files on Debian

Thursday, March 30, 2006 ★ 13:09 ★ Category Linux

Debian (and derived distributions such as Ubuntu) automatically cleans the /tmp directory on boot. In my opinion, this is basically a good thing. However, I’m a laptop user and it’s not uncommon to boot several times a day if you’re travelling around, so to keep my temporary files across reboots I have to save them elsewhere. This of course has the problem that you never get around to removing your old ‘temporary’ files…

Luckily, I’ve found a solution that comes standard with any Debian system. Snippet from /etc/default/rcS:

# Time files in /tmp are kept in days.
TMPTIME=7

So, the system keeps my temporary files (like PDF files opened from a browser) for a week, and then they are purged automatically on boot.