tmpwatch and removing directories....

Miloslav Trmac mitr at volny.cz
Mon May 16 20:57:57 UTC 2005


On Mon, May 16, 2005 at 01:43:59PM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> tmpwatch never seems to remove directories unless I give it the -c flag,
> which isn't always what I want to do. (In fact, usually it's not.) I think
> the problem is still the one described by Aleksey Nogin in this bug from
> July, 2000:
("This" bug is #14930.)

>     This problem existed for as long as tmpwatch was in RedHat distribution.
>     The problem is that by default tmpwatch uses atime for both files and
>     directories. But because tmpwatch is ran daily, the atime for
>     directories is always <= 1day, so it never removes them... I believe
>     that by default, tmpwatch should use atime for files and mtime for empty
>     directories...
> 
> Yet, that's marked as fixed in rawhide in August, 2000. Am I missing
> something? Thanks....
#91096, I think.

(Using mtime doesn't look safe enough; e.g. a daemon could create a
"queue" directory and poll it for files added by other processes; that
can lead to an often used directory with old mtime.)
	Mirek




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