No Space Left On My / Partition

I hope this is the right place for his. Here is my PC HDD drive configuration:

sda1 - 20 GB /
sda5 - 347 GB /home

sdb5 - 458 GB /IntHD2

sdc5 - 144 GB /IntHD3

When I try to download a file, I get an error message :-

There is not enough room on the disk to save /tmp/<name.torrent file>
Remove unnecessary files from the disk and try again, or try saving in a different location

When I checked sda1 it was completely full. The /tmp directory has over 28500 files making up 12.4GB. Can I just go into that directory and delete those files or is there a proper way of doing this.

Also, can I change the location of the /tmp directory to a drive with lots more space, without having to re-install everything again?
If so, how do I do that. I would want to move /tmp to sda5. Is is possible to have the /tmp cleared out automatically on a regular basis?

Thanks.

You normaly can delete files in your /tmp. There is even a way to do this automagicaly at boot time.
YaST > System > /etc/sysconfig Editor, then open System: Cron and look to CLEAR_TMP_DIRS_AT_BOOTUP.

You certainly should not have so many files in /tmp. You should keep /tmp for what it says: temporary files (normaly needed over system boot).

On the other hand, you download a file to keep it somewhere, why downloading it in /tmp and not to the place where it should go?

You can not simply move /tmp to sda5 when you have /home there. What you could do is make a directory somewhere in /home and make a soft link from /tmp to that place. But I will not recommend this. Regularly cleaning /tmp and not using it for files you want to keep elsewhere anyhow should keep your system (and you) happy.

Thanks, I will change the Cron setting. I don't want to keep the files in tmp. All downloads from Firefox are stored on a different drive completely. I don't know why it suddenly wanted to store that file in the /tmp directory.

You are welcome.

You could also investigate what (the majority) of these 28500 files are. I have only 66 files in /tmp and I do not clean up on boot! Who owns them, which program makes them, etc.

You are welcome.

You could also investigate what (the majority) of these 28500 files are. I have only 66 files in /tmp and I do not clean up on boot! Who owns them, which program makes them, etc.
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This problem only started recently. I am listed as the user. They are mainly html, jpg's and other graphics files. I had an idea, since most of the files are jpg's and gifs with the occasional text file and html file, that they might be the result of a new add-on for FF.

I installed Magics Downloader add-on. I will see if the amount of the tmp dir increases, now that I have uninstalled the add-on.

How can I "move the /tmp dir to a different drive. I have plenty of space, if needed, on drive 2 and 3?

You mentioned something about a soft link, earlier on....

When you have 12Gb of free space on / and /tmp can take its share of that, that should be adequate. Only when applics put things on /tmp and do not remove them when they stop running you will have a problem, but you will have that problem anywhere. It will only last longer before the fs is full when /tmp is somewhere else hving more space.

The remedy is to better the applic, or run a regular cron run that removes e.g. *.html and *.jpg files not used for three days (as an example). Not to put /tmp on a different disk with user data. When you do that that other disk becomes then part of the system disks, disks that should be there always when the system is running. Using non system disks for putting user data on them is a better policy.

How and where do I set the cron to clean the tmp dir out faster? is it in the same place you mentioned earlier?

I should think the parameters around the one I mentioned earlier (YaST > System > /etc/sysconfig Editor, then open System: Cron) like MUCH_DAYS_IN_TEMP are documented clear enough. Look for yourself.

When you want to go more specific you have to write a script doing what you want (and test it). An example might be

#!/bin/bash
# This script cleans /tmp from files ending in .html from /tmp not touched for at least 4 days.
# Should run regularly beacuse some stupid application puts them there and does not remove them.
find /tmp -name '*.html' -atime +3 -exec rm '{}' \;

(I did not test this! You must make your own criteria about what to delete)

Put this script into /root/bin/cron.daily.local
According to what I found this must be enough to get it run daily. When it does not run daily please say so andd we will put in root's crontab by hand.

And Ceterum Censeo: I should try to find the culprit who puts the rubbish in yor /tmp.

I have been looking into "who" has been filling my tmp. I think it is a combination of of an add-on, magic video downloader, and Thunderbird. Once I deleted magics add-on, the tmp dir didn't "fill-up" so quickly anymore, however the problem wasn't quite solved.

When I checked the tmp dir this morning, I noticed that it had about 65Gigs of files in it. I only had two programs running over night. Ktorrent and Thunderbird.

I will re-boot my system, deleting the contents of the tmp dir, then work the day and night as usual, not running ktorrent in this time. If the tmp dir is full then I know that TB is at fault. If not then Ktorrent is at fault.

That's the only thing I can think of doing to find out what is filling tmp all the time. This is a new problem, not older thank a week or so. I have been using the present configuration for about 4 months.

I have been looking into "who" has been filling my tmp. I think it is a combination of of an add-on, magic video downloader, and Thunderbird. Once I deleted magics add-on, the tmp dir didn't "fill-up" so quickly anymore, however the problem wasn't quite solved.

When I checked the tmp dir this morning, I noticed that it had about 65Gigs of files in it. I only had two programs running over night. Ktorrent and Thunderbird.

I will re-boot my system, deleting the contents of the tmp dir, then work the day and night as usual, not running ktorrent in this time. If the tmp dir is full then I know that TB is at fault. If not then Ktorrent is at fault.

That's the only thing I can think of doing to find out what is filling tmp all the time. This is a new problem, not older thank a week or so. I have been using the present configuration for about 4 months.
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65GB! blimey that is a huge amount in /tmp. i have mine set to delete at boot, and to a max of 2days. this way if i leave it on it deletes anyway. also, you may want to try azureus, in my opinion better than ktorrent, more customisable. that is remarkably strange to dump that much stuff in /tmp in a matter of days. you won't really need to keep the stuff in there, so, as hcvv suggested, i would delete it at boot. then see what is causing the problem, because that is a problem.