/tmp

I feel stupid asking this but what is /tmp? Temporary? I just read some Ubuntu's tips and tricks and I found out a way to clear out your /tmp folder everytime you reboot the machine or log out. Is this dangerous to do? Is there special stuff in my /tmp folder that is vital for the system to run? I'm almost positive it means that it is a temp folder but I am not quite for sure, if that is the case then I guess it would be ok to clear it out.

Yes it is tepmrary (as for as I know) since if you e.g. find a .pdf file on the web which you want to read, but not save it will be downloaded to /tmp for the pdf viewer to read. Also some package managers compile source in /tmp so that it doesn't waste valuble space. As far as I know it is safe to clear /tmp, since any program that needs a file there will create it if it is not there ;)

From The Linux Documentation Project: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesy.../html/tmp.html

Yep it's all temp crap, you'll notice when you start kde it will hav a bunch of directories dumped in there. Lilo too has an option to clear tmp on boot(or at least is portrayed that way in Mandriva). To be honest I often clear it when I'm up and running. Users have full write access here usually for this purpose.

some websites u go to frequently may not load up as fast if u always clear ur temp cache, i believe...

Files in /tmp should not be touched unless you know exactly what they are for and what they are doing. Lock files might be in /tmp, some programs rely on the use of /tmp and it expects it's files to be there when it looks. PostgreSQL for example uses /tmp, and deleting a certain file from there could break it (or at least require you to restart the server). Things in /tmp are temporary though, anything that uses /tmp needs to expect that /tmp will be empty on boot and that files not used for long periods of time may be deleted. Most distros at least delete /tmp on boot and/or shutdown. Some distros do check files in /tmp and delete those which haven't been used for a long time. But in general, do not touch /tmp.

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Originally Posted by valan

Files in /tmp should not be touched unless you know exactly what they are for and what they are doing. Lock files might be in /tmp, some programs rely on the use of /tmp and it expects it's files to be there when it looks. PostgreSQL for example uses /tmp, and deleting a certain file from there could break it (or at least require you to restart the server). Things in /tmp are temporary though, anything that uses /tmp needs to expect that /tmp will be empty on boot and that files not used for long periods of time may be deleted. Most distros at least delete /tmp on boot and/or shutdown. Some distros do check files in /tmp and delete those which haven't been used for a long time. But in general, do not touch /tmp.

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Just google'd a question and this was the first search result. Thanks for the info!