Hakan Bayındır <ha...@bayindir.org> writes: > Consider a long running task, which will take days or weeks (which is > the norm in simulation and science domains in general). System emitted a > warning after three days, that it'll delete my files in three days. My > job won't be finished, and I'll be losing three days of work unless I > catch that warning.
I have to admit that I'm a little surprised at the number of people who are apparently using /var/tmp for things that are clearly not temporary files in the traditional UNIX sense. Clearly this bit of folk knowledge is not as widespread as I thought, so we have to figure out how to deal with that, but periodically deleting files out of /var/tmp has been common (not universal, but common) UNIX practice for at least thirty years. Whatever we do with /var/tmp retention, I beg people to stop using /var/tmp for data you're keeping for longer than a few days and care about losing. That's not what it's for, and you *will* be bitten by this someday, somewhere, because even with existing Debian configuration many people run tmpreaper or similar programs. If you are running a long-running task that produces data that you care about, make a directory for it to use, whether in your home directory, /opt, /srv, whatever. /var/tmp's primary purpose historically was to support things like temporary recovery files that needed to survive a system crash, but which were still expected to be *temporary* in that one would then either use the recovery file or expect it to be deleted. Not as an extension of people's home directory. Your system is your system, so of course you can configure /var/tmp however you want and no one is going to stop you, but a lot of people on this thread are describing habits that are going to lose their data if they use a different distribution or even a differently-configured Debian distribution with tmpreaper installed. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
