May I emtpy the /tmp folder of my home dir ?

[sabin]

Hello there

I'm using Mandriva 2005 LE and KDE 3.2.3, and after a few months of extensive use, I have about five Go (yeah, five freaking thousand megabytes ) of files in my /home/tmp directory.

Do you know if I can delete the contents of that folder ?
As a windows former user i'd tend to suppose "yes, whatever lies in the temp dir is expendable", but well, I'm still new to Linux and I wouldn't want to risk to damage my system ^^

I would really like to have an assistant to help me make room by deleting unnecessary temporary files, it's too bad Mandriva won't have one ^^

Thanks in advance for the reply

[darklordsatan]

It is a long time since I tried mandriva (back in the mandrake times, I think version 8.1), so I dont recall of that /home/tmp folder.
However, I have experience with Debian and a /tmp folder on a server at collegue, and yes, you can safely delete such folders.
Basically, they are used by applications to store temporary data, as well as the x server (IIRC) and such, so you are going to be ok just to issue a

rm -fr /home/tmp/*

Your mandriva box wont cry or start failing because of this.
Besides, 5 GB is way too much for a tmp folder, hence I think you have never deleted it since your fresh installation, right?

Cheers

[S. M. Ibrahim]

You can do this but the problem is:

you may lost the setting/data of some programs, which are using this folder to store temoprary data.

Example: Downloader for X and many more.........

[sabin]

I just found a four gigabytes ISO image inside that temp folder, that's already better

I think then that I'll empty that temp folder, with just one slight nuance : I'll only delete the files and folders whose owner is not the root (such as orbit-root)...

Thank you very much for the kind helpful replies

[darklordsatan]

I dont know how much experience with Linux you have, but with time and patience, you'll learn what to delete and what not to, eventually.

Cheers

[sabin]

Considering that not everything from a dir called "tmp" can be deleted, it's rather disturbing, you'll recognize.
Oh well, i'll do with it, after all, it's indeed through experiencing that you learn the most ^^