deleted everything in /tmp directory.....

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I wanted to clean up my tmp directory. So I went to the /tmp directory and did sudo rm -r * in /tmp. But now I get error messages when I open an application.
For instance, when I try to open nautilus I get:

(nautilus:22457): Eel-WARNING **: GConf error:
  Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See [GConf configuration system](http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/) for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
(nautilus:22457): Eel-WARNING **: GConf error:
  Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See [GConf configuration system](http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/) for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf warning: failure listing pairs in `/apps/nautilus/preferences': Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See [GConf configuration system](http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/) for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
(nautilus:22457): Eel-WARNING **: GConf error:
  Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See [GConf configuration system](http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/) for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)

and a bunch of other errors.

Similar things happen when I try to open yast:

An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for GNOME SuperUser. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly.

Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)

What am I supposed to do now?

2

Logout and login again.

3

yap, that solved my problem.
Thanks!!

4

The problem is you also deleted files that were in use and relevant to your current session. So be careful next time.

5

Yes, you better do not do this as long as users are loged in, or even other programs are running. A perfect time to do this is at boot (not very helpfull if you do not reboot for over a year of course) when almost nothing runs. And a perfect place to configure this is with YaST > System > etc/sysconfig editor. In there goto System > Cron. There you find variables like CLEAR_TEMP_DIRS_AT_BOOTUP, TMP_DIRS_TO_CLEAN, MAX_DAYS_IN_TMP and more. Here you can define the behaviour you like to keep your /tmp tidy. It is done by a cron run at boot.

6

okay, didn’t know that.

7

As suggested by hcw, for most desktop users, typically, you just need to set the value of MAX_DAYS_IN_TMP to “3” will do.
This means that that your temp files will be removed if they are 3 days old. (cron will do this trick).
You need to be careful if you are in a server environment and you have long running programs (or services) that may create temp files for longer sessions.

8

That is why I tell :wink: . This is the place to learn lots of things.

9

Thanks for the tips with etc/sysconfig (I was also wondering how to safely clean-up that huge /tmp dir.)

Now, I would also like to do some clean-up in /var/log/
Can I safely just delete all those .gz and .bz2 archives ?

10

Yes you can. They are older log files (the log rotates every so many time, or on a reboot). As long as you do not think you need to search logging long ago (you can see the creation dates/times that the file was closed) you can savely rm them

11

Done.
(I don’t think I will need archives that are sometimes as old as 1 year old.)

12

Just done this, and re-booted, but none of the older files/dirs were deleted.
Or should I wait in 3 days from now ?

13

Did you see just after rebooting? As I understood with standard settings cron is run the first time 15 minutes after booting. Could it be that?

14

You are right, I realized that afterward.
But still not deleted after more than half an hour. Waiting a bit more…

15

Ok. I guess that as the name suggest, “daily.cron” is only executed once per day. So I have to check for changes tomorrow.

16

You are right.

17

2257 elements in /tmp yesterday, 910 left today.

I’m wondering why there are still many directories and files kept, althought they are old and I’m the owner of them.

  • many “keyring-…” directories,
  • many “plugtmp-…” directories,
  • many “seahorse-…” directories,
  • many “gnucash.trace…” files,
  • some “jar_cache…tmp” files (dating August 2008)
18

It uses safe-rm and safe-rmdir to remove files and directories. So, see if there are symlinks. Also, directories have to be empty to remove.

19

No, none were symlinks. (Anyway, I ‘rm’ and 'rm -r’ed them “by hand”.)

Maybe the selection is based on the “last accessed” timestamp instead of the “last modified” timestamp ? (I’ve checked some of the old files that are left in /tmp and they have been accessed recently, mostly yesterday.)

(Wow, I’ve just spotted that there are a LOT of files in /tmp/orbit-…/ directories as well. :open_mouth: )

20

You are right, it checks the “atime” while comparing the timestamp. You can check it yourself.

cat /etc/cron.daily/suse.de-clean-tmp