too many subfolders in /tmp .. Where from it ? why subdirectories are not deleted?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Problem: too many subfolders in /tmp …

Example:

ls -la
total 23176
drwxrwxrwt 705 root root     53248 May 15 12:49 .
drwxr-xr-x  23 root root      4096 Apr 18 12:10 ..
-rw-------   1 kkk  users    10410 Nov  3  2017 .com.google.Chrome.arMqx7
-rw-------   1 kkk  users     9226 Nov  3  2017 .com.google.Chrome.aud6Qv
-rw-------   1 kkk  users     4181 Nov  3  2017 .com.google.Chrome.bPGovj
-rw-------   1 kkk  users     2069 Dec 29 15:35 .com.google.Chrome.F3YqBf
-rw-------   1 kkk  users     3013 Dec 29 15:35 .com.google.Chrome.fEYSDN
-rw-------   1 kkk  users     1351 Dec 29 15:35 .com.google.Chrome.FVNM7F
-rw-------   1 kkk  users     3348 Dec 29 15:35 .com.google.Chrome.G6uPtD
-rw-------   1 kkk  users     2069 Dec 29 15:35 .com.google.Chrome.h7YUU1
drwx------   2 kkk  users     4096 Jan 11 20:47 .com.google.Chrome.j4gmgW
-rw-------   1 kkk  users     1580 Mar 22 18:20 .com.google.Chrome.jQbl84
drwx------   2 kkk  users     4096 Mar 22 15:29 .com.google.Chrome.kBpoqc
drwx------   2 kkk  users     4096 Oct 16  2017 .com.google.Chrome.lel9hR
drwx------   2 kkk  users     4096 Mar 21 20:43 .com.google.Chrome.lohXaL
drwx------   2 kkk  users     4096 Feb 22 06:47 .com.google.Chrome.m9hwnw
drwx------   2 kkk  users     4096 Nov  3  2017 .com.google.Chrome.n9grUm
.....................
-rw-------   1 kkk  users      442 Mar 18 07:07 .xfsm-ICE-130UFZ
-rw-------   1 kkk  users      442 Aug 20  2017 .xfsm-ICE-1HED5Y
-rw-------   1 kkk  users      442 Apr 12 12:47 .xfsm-ICE-1SU4GZ
-rw-------   1 kkk  users      442 May 11 06:06 .xfsm-ICE-1WGVIZ
-rw-------   1 kkk  users      442 Mar 22 09:43 .xfsm-ICE-2UKEGZ
.......
drwx------   3 root root      4096 Sep 27  2017 systemd-private-019ad6aea5c341f987ac78ca1cd1ab73-ntpd.service-3iwtMu
drwx------   3 root root      4096 Mar  9 20:29 systemd-private-04c1818b93514e168fe0a84309c751aa-ntpd.service-Le3dNX
drwx------   3 root root      4096 Mar  9 20:36 systemd-private-04c1818b93514e168fe0a84309c751aa-rtkit-daemon.service-QH1YLz


.....................

Where from it ?
Why subdirectories are not deleted?

Serg

2

Compared to what I have here on a system with a KDE Plasma 5 GUI and somewhat more than one user, you really don’t have so many directories in /tmp/.
The result of “find /tmp/ -type d -print | wc -l” on this system is ‘46’ – one less than the actual value because “find” includes the “/tmp/” directory in the list …

Looking at the dates of the files and directories in your /tmp/ directory, there’s a couple of applications which haven’t cleaned up their “/tmp/” usage when they exited. The culprits are:

  • “systemd”: you can safely delete the “systemd-private-019ad6aea5c341f987ac78ca1cd1ab73-ntpd.service-3iwtMu” directory and contents dated September last year. The current “systemd” directories will be removed when you next shutdown or reboot. (“systemd” is quite well behaved these days … )
  • “xfsm”: delete everything which is related to sessions that are no longer active.
  • “Google’s Chrome”: ditto.